Google Drive Update to Protect Shared Links

We recently received a report via our Vulnerability Reward Program of a security issue affecting a small subset of file types in Google Drive and have since made an update to address it. Please refer to the post on the Google Online Security blog for details.

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Restore a user's Google Drive files

Admins can now restore a given user’s deleted Google Drive files for a specified date range. This helps ensure that, if a user accidentally deletes important files, those files are not permanently lost. The feature pertains to files that have been emptied from the Trash only. Files still in the Trash can be easily recovered by the user.

Release track:

Rapid release and Scheduled release

For more information:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/6052340

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Better document and image viewing experience in Gmail and Google Drive

We've launched a new version of the UI for viewing documents and images in Gmail and Google Drive to give more focus to the content itself. The tool bar has moved to the top (and disappears when not in use) and the document/image frame is now wider, giving users a more streamlined experience.

Release track:

Rapid release, with Scheduled release coming in two weeks (for Gmail only, changes in Drive will launch to all tracks today)

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Activity view, link sharing and more in the new Google Drive mobile apps

The Google Drive mobile apps for Android and iOS now have a cleaner design, more responsive animations, and faster background syncing. Sharing your files is also simpler and faster. Key features include:

• Activity view: a stream of changes to your files and folders, accessible through the details panel
• Link sharing: easily share files and folders directly from the mobile app using a link

The new version of the app is available now on Android and iOS. Release track: Rapid release and Scheduled release For more information: Get the Google Drive app on Google Play
Get the Google Drive app in the App Store

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A faster, redesigned Google Drive

Google Drive will have a new look and speedier performance on the desktop, making organizing and sharing files faster and easier than ever. Users can now right click on a file to see recent activity, set sharing permissions, and enable files to be accessed while offline. When selecting multiple files, users can take actions on the entire group in three ways—right click on the selection, use the menu above the file area, or simply drag the group to move to a new folder location.

This new version is rolling out progressively to rapid release domains, who can opt-in and try the new features and interface. Scheduled release domains will be able to opt-in soon. The plan is to rollout the new Drive interface to everyone in the near future.

Release track:

Rapid release, with Scheduled release coming soon

For more information:

Google Drive overview

Learn how to opt-in

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Unlimit your business with Google Drive for Work

Today at Google I/O we announced Google Drive for Work—a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls.

Key features:

• unlimited storage for all employees, including files up to 5 TB in size
• new audit reporting so admins can see activity like moving, deleting or sharing files within or outside the company, plus an audit API that makes this data available to developers
• new security controls so admins can set sync client, offline, Drive app and add-on settings at the Organizational Unit (OU)-level
• includes Google Apps Vault, which has been expanded to provide search for all content stored in Drive

We’re also happy to announce that all files uploaded to Google Drive will now be encrypted for all users (consumer and Google Apps alike) -- so your content is encrypted not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers.

Google Drive for Work is now available for new and existing Google Apps for Business customers for $10/user/month, under a new SKU called Google Apps Unlimited.

For more information:

Overview of Google Drive for Work

Overview of Google Apps Unlimited

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Domain management of Google Drive Apps

Last year, we launched a new and improved Google Apps Marketplace experience, allowing admins to be able to find, manage and deploy third-party applications directly from the Google Apps Admin Console.

Earlier this year, we launched the ability for admins to allow their users to install applications that integrate with Google Drive. If this setting was disabled, however, admins were not able to install Marketplace apps that integrate with Drive.

With today’s launch, Marketplace applications deployed by admins will be able to integrate with Google Drive for users who are provided with the app, even if this Admin Console setting is disabled. In essence, admins can now whitelist the Drive applications that their users can install.

Release Track:

Rapid release and Scheduled release

For more information:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/172482

https://support.google.com/a/topic/1056394?hl=en&ref_topic=27380

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Crop Images in Google Slides and Google Drawings

Google Slides and Google Drawings now let you crop images. You can even crop them to fit a shape like a donut, a smiley face, a star, an arrow and more. This is called a mask and you can choose various shapes, arrows, callouts or equations.

Just select an image and click the "crop" button from the toolbar to crop an image. "Drag and drop the the blue handles until the image has been cropped the way you want. A shadow of the original image will be present to help you see how much you are cropping. Click Enter on your keyboard or click back onto your slide to save the cropped image," explains Google. To fit the image into a specific shape, select it, click the arrow next to the crop button and choose a shape.

You can also add a border to your image: click the line weight icon and change the line color.

Here's an example from Google Drawings that uses the double brace mask:

Google Drive Add-ons

Google Docs and the new version of Google Sheets now support add-ons. Just click the new Add-ons menu, select "Get add-ons" and install some of them. They're not browser extensions, they're just ways to add new features to Google Docs and Sheets. Some of them are developed by Google, while others are developed by third-parties.

"Once you install an add-on it will become available across all of your documents or spreadsheets and you can start using it right away," informs Google. You can always find them in the Add-ons menu.

There are add-ons that translate the selected text, find synonyms, create a table of contents, insert maps, create charts from spreadsheets, generate bibliography, check your writing for consistency, add mail merge to Google Docs, print address labels, remove duplicates, import Google Analytics data and more.

Here's the Translate add-on in action. Select some text, go to the Add-ons menu, click Translate and Start. You can select the destination language in the sidebar that shows up. For some reason, only a few destination languages are supported.

The New Google Sheets

There's a new version of Google Sheets. "It's faster, supports larger spreadsheets, has a number of new features, and works offline," informs Google.

Just in case you're wondering how to enable it, you should go to Google Drive's settings page, enable "Try the new Google Sheets" in the Editing tab and click "Save". You'll get the new version of the application only for the files you create from now on. The existing files will still open in the old Google Sheets.

There are some missing features in the new Google Sheets (protected sheets, spell check, publishing) and this shows that this is an early release.

So what's new? You can create and edit spreadsheets offline in Chrome, just like in Docs and Slides. The new Sheets is designed with performance in mind and handles huge spreadsheets: it supports 2 million cells of data and all of the other limitations have been removed. You're no longer limited to 256 columns per sheet. Other improvements: spreadsheets load faster and scrolling is smoother.

There are some new formula editing tools. "In the new Google Sheets, we've made it easier to build complex formulas in your spreadsheets. For example, you'll now see syntax highlighting, which shows you the argument in your function that you are working on, and you'll get more details on how to fix errors in your formula by hovering over them." Google also added 24 new functions, including SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, and AVERAGEIF.

Another new feature is called filter views and it lets you create, save and share filters, so you can get different views of your data without disrupting how others are viewing your spreadsheet.

"In the new Google Sheets, you can apply conditional formatting using a custom formula. This allows you to apply formatting to a cell or range of cells based on the contents of other cells."

You can also add a color to each of your sheet tabs, paste a rotated version of the copied cells from a column to a row or from a row to a column, restrict find and replace to a range of cells and apply custom formatting for currencies, dates, and numbers.

Move Gmail Attachments to Google Drive, Save Space

Mail services are inefficient when it comes to storing files because of the MIME encoding overhead. "This encoded size is the actual size of the message as it travels over the Internet and is always larger than the raw size because of the MIME overhead and because binary attachments are generally encoded using base64 encoding.  Base64-encoded files are usually about 137% the size of the original files," says Erik Kangas.

If you want to use Google's storage more efficiently, you can find some old messages with large attachments, save the attachments to Google Drive and delete the messages. To keep the messages, you can forward them to yourself, remove the attachments, add Google Drive links and remove the original messages.

I've tested this by saving 2 FLAC attachments from 2 messages (about 43 MB) to Google Drive and deleting the associated messages from Gmail, including from the trash. Here's what I got:

* 1.58 GB used before moving files to Google Drive:

* 1.56 GB used after moving files to Google Drive:

To find Gmail messages with large attachments, you can use these operators. For example, search for [larger:5M] to find messages larger than 5 MB (that's the total size of the message).

More About Gmail's New Attachment UI

After more than a week of waiting, I got the new interface for Gmail attachments and it's much better than I expected. Most of the features from the old interface are still available, but there are some new Google Drive features that improve the user experience.

Here are some of my favorite features:

1. Thumbnails - they're displayed for many files, not just for photos. They help you distinguish between attachments and they're especially useful for PDF files, presentations and photos.

2. Save to Drive - mouse over an attachments, click "save to drive" and you can select the Drive folder where to save the file. You no longer have to visit Google Drive to move the file. Please note that the file is automatically saved to Google Drive and selecting a folder is optional.

3. Save all to Drive - if a message has more than one attachment, you can save all the files to Google Drive with one click. You only need to find the Drive button placed next to the attachments. You can also click "download all" to download a ZIP file with all the attachments.

4. Show in Drive - Gmail is smart to remember when you save a file to Google Drive and replaces "save to Drive" with "show in Drive", which opens the file in Google Drive. "Save all to drive" is disabled after clicking the button once.

5. Quick preview - just click an attachment and you can preview the file inside Gmail. This works for photos, PDF files, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more. To scroll down, use the mouse wheel, the down arrow key or Page Down. You can click the "pop out" icon next to "x" to open the preview in a new tab. To close the preview box, press Esc or click the "x" icon.

6. Slideshow - you can quickly go to the next attachment by clicking the arrow icon or by using keyboard shortcuts (right arrow key). Use the left arrow key to go back to the previous attachment. This is only a manual slideshow, there's no support for automatic slideshows.

7. Share photos on Google+ - click the attachment, then click the Google+ button at the bottom of the page. For multiple image attachments, click the Google+ button next to the list of attachments and you can share all the images on Google+.

8. Print files - click the attachment, then click the "print" button at the bottom of the page.

9. Zoom in/zoom out/zoom to fit - use the zoom buttons for a more in-depth look.

10. Edit files - for files you can import in Google's Drive apps, you'll also see a button like this when you mouse over the attachment: "Edit in Google Sheets", "Edit in Google Docs" or "Edit in Google Slides". Click the button to save the attachment as an editable file.

When you preview the file, you can click "Open with" and select an app that handles your file. This is not limited to Google's apps, so you can select apps like Zoho, DocuSign and more.

Oh, and one more thing: links to Google Drive files are treated as attachments.

While the new interface is great, I found a some annoyances. There's a cool feature that is no longer available in the new interface: it allowed to see all the image attachments on a single page. Another downside is that you need to mouse over an attachment to see the entire filename and its size.

{ Thanks, Stefan. }

Gmail's New Attachment UI, Powered by Google Drive

An hour after posting about Gmail's new attachment UI, Gmail's blog announced the new feature:

"With today's update to Gmail, (...) you can view attachments and save files directly to Google Drive without ever leaving Gmail, making it easy to access them later from whatever device you're on - computer, phone or tablet. The next time you open an email with attachments, you'll see new previews of the files at the bottom of the email, from photos and videos to spreadsheets and PDFs."

Gmail now shows thumbnails for many file formats. Mouse over an attachment to download it or save it to Google Drive.

Gmail shows a list of Google Drive folders, so you can save the file to the right folder directly from Gmail. You can also download all the attachments or save all of them to Google Drive.

Click the attachments to preview files inline using Google Drive. The nice thing is that Google Drive Preview opens inside Gmail.

"This new attachment experience is available on desktop and will be rolling out over the next week," informs Google, which also mentions that Google Drive has 120 million active users.

{ via Gmail's blog }

Google's Storage Problem

A lot of people wonder what happens when you stop paying for additional Google storage. Google doesn't delete your files, but you're forced to delete some of them because you can't upload new files until you use less than 15GB of storage (your quota may be different).

A downside of Google's shared storage system is that it affects both Gmail and Google+ Photos, not just Google Drive. Gmail used to offer 10GB of free storage, Picasa Web/Google+ Photos only 1GB and Google Drive - 5GB. Small photos (< 2048x2048) and short videos (less than 15 minutes) uploaded using Google+ Photos, as well as the documents, spreadsheets and presentations created using Google's Drive apps don't count towards your storage limit.

"If you exceed your quota limit, you'll receive warnings in each product and you'll need to correct the issue as soon as you can. Otherwise, you'll be unable to upload additional items to your Drive or photos to Google+, and, after a period of time, incoming messages to your Gmail account will be returned to the sender and you won't be able to send new messages," explains Google.

Now that Yahoo Mail offers 1TB of free storage and Outlook.com "includes email storage that expands to provide you with as much storage space as you need", Gmail's 15GB limit doesn't look that impressive. Maybe Google wants to encourage people to use Google Drive for uploading files, instead of using Gmail attachments.

Yahoo's Flickr service offers 1TB of free photo storage. "No limited pixels, no cramped formats, no memories that fall flat." Suddenly, Google's photo offering is less impressive: you get unlimited photo storage, but only if you resize the photos.

It looks like Google no longer has the edge when it comes to free storage. Gmail offered 1GB of free storage when its main competitors only included a few megabytes of storage. Now roles are reversed.

The Storage Used by Gmail and Google Drive

Now that Google offers unified storage that's shared between Gmail, Google Drive and Google+ Photos, it's more difficult to tell how much storage is used by each service. You can always click "Manage" next to "X GB (Y%) of Z GB used" at the bottom of the page in Gmail and Google Drive, then mouse over the chart.

Google Drive has a new feature that shows more details about your storage without having to open a new page: just mouse over "X GB (Y%) of Z GB used" and you'll see something like this:

10 GB of Free Google Storage for Installing Quickoffice

If you've installed the Quickoffice app for Android or iOS 2 weeks ago, you'll now have 10 GB of free storage for 2 years. Check the Google Storage page, mouse over the chart and look for the "Quickoffice promotion".

You only had to install a free app. You didn't have to buy a Moto X phone (50 GB for 2 years), a regular Chromebook (100 GB for 2 years) or a Chromebook Pixel (1 TB for 3 years). Google Drive's offers for phones and Chromebooks have special pages.

It's funny to see that Google offered free storage for installing an app that used to cost $15-20.

Free Quickoffice for Android and iOS

Google announced a new Quickoffice app for Android and iOS that's free and it's optimized for both phones and tablets. The previous paid Quickoffice apps are no longer available, but not all the features from the paid apps are included in the free app. The new Quickoffice application supports a single cloud storage provider (Google Drive) and it requires to log in using a Google account.

Google acquired Quickoffice because it did a better job at handling Microsoft Office files than Google Docs. This was especially important for Google Apps users. Google started to work on porting Quickoffice to Native Client and integrating the application with Chrome OS. Now the mobile apps are free.

There's some overlap between Quickoffice and Google Drive apps, so offering two apps for editing documents, spreadsheets and presentations may seem strange. Quickoffice is a basic office suite that works offline, it lets you create and edit Microsoft Office files and annotate PDFs. You can store these files in Google Drive or on your mobile device. Files uploaded by Quickoffice can't be edited by Google Drive apps without converting them. Google Drive doesn't let you create or edit files when you are offline.

I find the Drive editing interface more intuitive and easier to use, but Quickoffice offers more features. When you open a file in Google Drive for iOS, the application first needs to upload the file to Google Drive. If you try the same thing in Quickoffice, the application opens the file and lets you edit it. I hope that the two apps will merge at some point.

Even if you don't need Quickoffice, it's still a good idea to install the app: you'll get 10GB of free Drive storage for 2 years. "If you sign in to your Google Account from the new Quickoffice app for Android or iOS by September 26, 2013, for two years, an extra 10GB of Google Drive storage will be added to your account in the next few weeks." If you don't get the extra storage, remember that will be added "in the next few weeks".

Here are the download links:

* Quickoffice for Android (phones and tablets, Android 2.2+)
* Quickoffice for iOS (iPhone/iPad - requires iOS 6+)

Those who paid for Quickoffice will probably be disappointed: no more updates for their apps, no iOS7 bug fixes. "Quickoffice Pro and Pro HD are not fully compatible with iOS 7 and some features may not work. After March 31, 2014, all cloud storage services will become unavailable on Quickoffice Pro and Quickoffice Pro HD," informs Google. Fortunately, "if you purchased Quickoffice Pro or Pro HD on or after June 17, 2013, you are eligible to receive 50GB of free Google Drive storage (with proof of purchase)."

(Quickoffice Pro and Quickoffice Pro HD used to cost $14.99 and $19.99. Pretty expensive, indeed.)

Google Keep to Integrate With Google Drive

Google Keep was supposed to integrate with Google Drive, but it's still a distinct app. Google Keep is a pretty basic app and doesn't have a lot of features, so you can't expect that it will improve.

Right now, you can only insert images and save audio files when using the dictation feature from the mobile app. Google Keep's code includes multiple references to an upcoming feature that lets you upload any file to Google Drive and add it to a note, preview the file using the Google Drive Viewer or open it using various apps. You'll also be able to add videos (YouTube URLs or videos uploaded to Google Drive) and play them inside Google Keep.

While this isn't the Drive integration I expected, it's still a cool feature. Hopefully, Keep will become a Google Drive app and you'll be able to open and edit your notes from Google Drive.

Update: The screenshots are from the Chrome app for Google Keep, but there are similar references in the desktop Google Keep web app.

Which Google Drive Images Are Added to Google+ Photos?

If you're wondering why not all the image files from Google Drive are available in Google+ Photos, here's the explanation. Google+ Photos only imports photos if they meet these criteria:

1. photos MUST be at least 512 x 512
2. JPG photos MUST have 'Date Taken' EXIF metadata
3. supported formats: JPG, GIF, WebP, RAW.

I've tested various image files and these are the rules. Google wants to restrict the feature to photos, but it's not clear why GIF and WebP are allowed, while PNG isn't.

{ Thanks, Martin. }

Find the Number of Files From a Google Drive Folder

Google Drive lacks many basic features. For example, it's not easy to tell how many files are in a folder. Here's a way to do that:

Method #1: convert and download

1. right-click a folder
2. click "Download"
3. you'll find the number of files after waiting a few seconds. Sometimes, Google doesn't show the number of files and you should try again
4. click "Cancel".

If Google doesn't show the number of files, there's another way:

Method #2: move to

1. open the folder
2. repeatedly scroll down until you reach the end the folder. You can use the End key
3. select all the files using Shift+A
4. click "More" and "Move to"
5. click "Cancel".

"Move to" doesn't count the files from subfolders.

There's another option for folders with less than 500 files:

Method #3: folder view

1. open the parent folder
2. ctrl+click the target folder in the main view
3. you'll see the number of files in the page that opens in a new tab. This only shows the number of files if the folder has 500 files or less. If the folder has more than 500 files, you'll still see "500 items". That's a limitation of the folder sharing feature, which only includes the first 500 files from a folder.

Method #4: the Drive app

Probably the best option is to install the Google Drive app and quickly find the number of files of each Google Drive folder. If you use Windows Explorer, right-click the folder and select "Properties".

{ Thanks, Sushubh. }