Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Human readable sharing links for files in Google Drive

If you follow the instructions for sharing links to google drive files, you end up with horrible links that are mostly just long random strings, which violate Google's own advice about URLs, but are necessary to avoid namespace conflicts.



To get a more human readable link, right click on a file in drive, click Details, then use the link under 'Hosting'. It still has a random string, but the string is the same for all files within each Drive folder and the end of the URL is the same as the name of the file in Drive, which is a significant improvement.

3 comments:

Joost said...

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately I don't see the Hosting option listed under Details. Has this been removed? Thanks, Jzt

G said...

Nope, still works. Make sure the folder you are sharing is 'Public on the web'. Documented here (which is itself a hosted page):

https://googledrive.com/host/0B716ywBKT84AMXBENXlnYmJISlE/GoogleDriveHosting.html

This only works for non-google docs in a 'public on the web' folder. i.e. you can't get a hosting link for a google doc/spreadsheet/presentation in a 'public on the web folder'.

Ed said...

I don't see "Hosting" on the "New Drive" any more but the previous form still works, ie.
https://googledrive.com/host/PARENT-DIR-RANDOM-HASH/filename.extension