Direct Permalinks for Google Drive

If you've ever researched Internet-based data storage, you're probably familiar with Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive, and other similar services. Google recently threw their hat into the ring by merging Google Docs into their new service, Google Drive, which is maybe the most inexpensive cloud storage available and even provides 5 GB for free.

While uploading years and 100+ GB worth of family photos and videos, I realized Google Drive is lacking in one area: sharing. Sharing any file is allowed, but is really unusual in that you cannot give someone a link directly to a file. Instead, you can only share your file via Google's file viewer. For an example of the file viewer in action, see this Google Drive link.

This means you also cannot embed any of your stored images directly onto a web page. In response to these limitations, I developed as a public service a solution called GD URL that allows you to create a direct, permanent link to all your files stored with Google Drive.

If you ever might need this service, please give it a try at gdURL.com. I hope you find it helpful!


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Totally appreciate the concern, however it's not actually circumventing a blocked feature or anything. It's more enhancing their service by using tools they provide. In fact, the way it actually works is by using the programming interface provided by Google, which explicitly allows the fetching of information about files in Drive.

Of course, they could always just add direct support for the feature themselves or maybe discontinue the programming interface at some point. For now, though, it's the only type of solution that'll do.
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