A Guide to Folders

Introduction

The essential multi-tool for power-users of Google Drive. This lightweight web-app makes working with multiple files in your Google Drive quicker, more productive and easier.

Features

Find and sort with folders fast with free-text searching and simple querying
Perform Advanced Searching within a single folder, or do a recursive search of all descendent folders as well, includes searching by:
- Properties, including the presence of a property (using AND / OR selectors)
- Name Regexes (include/exclude files)
- Sharing Level
Bulk convert files to native file formats (such as Word to Google Docs) in the browser
Bulk export native file formats to PDF, including updating previously exported versions
Bulk deletion or starring of files
Tag files and folders with custom properties
Tally folder and file sizes to see where your storage space is being used, and for which types of files

Workflow

Folders is designed around a straightforward search (for) then act (upon) process. You can start by opening any folder, team drive or your entire Google Drive. From here, you can see you can perform actions (such as converting, cloning, exporting, deleting or auditing) on the files in that folder or navigate to other folders.

To refine your current view, you can sort and filter by clicking on the column headers. This is a very fast way to find a particular folder/file (within the current set of items), as filters will be applied as you type, rather than having to wait for search results to appear. Clicking on the remove cross (situated on the far right of the actions column) will remove that item from your current view, which is useful when refining a list of items before performing a bulk action. Clicking on a file name will load then display a preview / thumbnail (if available) and clicking on a folder will navigate to that folder in the web-app.

Various icons are also shown to make common actions just a click away:

/ - Indicates if an item is shared or not, clicking will audit the sharing permissions of the item.
★ / ☆ - Indicates if an item is starred or not, clicking will either star or un-star the item
- Clicking on the rubbish bin / trashcan will delete this item from Google Drive
⇗ - Clicking on an link with this icon will open the item in another of our Apps, or an external tool

Searching

You can also search for files in the current folder, or (optionally) in all descendent folders as well. Searching will allow you to perform actions on a large number of files (such as converting all the Word documents in your Google Drive, or just those below a certain folder). Search results will appear in new tabs within the web-app, allowing you to quickly switch between sets of results.

Logging

When you are cloning or converting a set of files, you can also opt to log the results of the actions to a Google Sheet. This will happen automatically if you choose to batch the actions. A sheet will be automatically created (in your Google Drive) and populated as the process runs.