How to Share Google Drive Files and Folders 2021
Do you need to share Google Drive files and folders with specific people? Wondering what type of sharing permissions you can set in Google Drive? Wonder no more! In today’s article, I’m going to tell you how to become a master shared of Google Drive files and folders.
How to Share a Folder in Google Drive
Today, I’m telling you how to share Google Drive files and folders, as well as how to set sharing permissions in Google Drive. Sharing Google Drive files and folders is a very easy. Let’s start with how to share a folder in Google Drive. And make sure to stick around for important sharing permissions too. So here we are in my Google Drive, and I’ve got a few folders here.
Now, to give you an example of how I use Google Drive, let’s say a company reaches out to do a collab with me on my products, I might want to share my media kit with them. It’s not necessarily something I want to keep on my website, but it’s definitely something I’d like to share easily with a link.
So you don’t even have to open this entire folder if you don’t want to. You can simply right-click on the folder hereto open your share options. Now you can select ‘share’ and this will allow you to manually add individual users or email addresses to grant access to this folder. But, you may not want to constantly be adding people to a folder to grant them access.
Maybe you just want to create a link once, and just share that link at your convenience. Well, you can do that too.
So same thing here, right-click on the folder, and this time, select ‘get link’. From this pop-up, all you have to do is select copy link’ and your link to this folder is now copied and you can share it with whomever, whenever.
And if you’re already inside the folder, you can share from there too, by clicking the dropdown arrow to the right of the folder name, and selecting your sharing options.
Also Read: Top 5 Google Calendar Tips 2021 for Productivity
How to Share a File and Folder
There’s a big reason why sharing a link to a Google Drive folder is so powerful, but you’ll have to keep watching to find out what that is. Now let’s say you just want to share a single file with someone, not an entire folder. The exact same options are available to you.
From your opened file, click on File, then share. In this popup, you have the option to add individual email addresses or to create a shareable link. And of course, if you’re not in the file, you can right-click on the preview of it and select either ‘share’ or ‘get link’.
How to Set Sharing Permissions
Now, these sharing options are great and all, but you’re really going to have to understand the sharing permissions when you’re sharing folders and files in Google Drive. So let’s go over those important options.
So the same sharing permissions are available no matter how you share a folder or file, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re manually adding email addresses or sharing a link. And so if you’re adding individual people to your file or folder, you’ll notice to the right, there is a little dropdown arrow.
You may not want someone to have full editor controls, for example, so you may want to set the share to the viewer, where they can just view the document, or you can set that person to a commenter.
That way they can view the file or folder and leave comments on anything if necessary.
The Power of Shared Links
The exact same permissions are available when you’re sharing a link. So right now, my settings are set to restricted. You’ll want to change this if you want to be able to just easily share a link with anyone. So use the toggle here to set to ‘anyone with a link can view’.
Now you’ll notice just like before, we have the same toggles to the right, where we can set the link permissions. If you’re sharing a link, you probably should just keep it at the ‘viewer’ permission level.
That way, if you share the link with one person and that person wants to share it with their colleague, they can just pass along the link and it’ll provide that person the same permissions.
In this case, the permissions are tied to the link itself, rather than the individual person. So using a shared link as an example, here what it looks like on the end of the receiver. I’ve been working in Chrome, so let’s open firefox here and paste the shared link in the browser bar.
Here is the folder I shared, and just as the permissions would suggest, I can view any of these files and documents inside the folder, but I can’t edit anything.
Because I talk you all the cool features of collaborating within google drive like viewing and tending to comments, and the ability to see a complete version history of your file.
Now, remember when I told you there’s a big plus to sharing a link to a folder? Well here’s why. Once you’ve created the link, you’re done.
That link will always stay the same no matter what you add or remove it from the folder. So you can always make sure your media kit or whatever it is you’re sharing, is always up-to-date by adding new files and docs as necessary, and rest assured that whoever has access to this folder via this link, will always be viewing the most recent version.
Shortening Shared Links
Now keep in mind, you don’t have to always share the giant long, ugly, URL. You can use free link shorteners like a bit. to shorten the shareable link. Or, you could add it as hyperlinked text in your email to the client or person you’re sharing it with. Want even more Google Drive content?
Well, that’s how to share Google Drive files and folders and how to set sharing permissions in Google Drive.
Now I want to hear from you. What do you love about file-sharing in Google Drive? Let everyone know in the comments below. As always, thank you guys so much for reading.