Share Direct Links to Files in Google Drive and Skip the Web Viewer

While Google aims for Drive to be a competent Dropbox competitor, there’s one small but key feature that isn’t easy: sharing direct download links. Fortunately, you can create your own.

As tech tips blog Digital Inspiration points out, most of the links Google gives you to share will open a file in the web viewer. While this is nice, you may not want to make the recipient jump through hoops just to download those TPS reports. If you want to share a direct link, simply change the format of the link from this:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/FILE_ID/edit?usp=sharing

to this:

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=FILE_ID

Note that you’ll need to grab the file ID from the original link (highlighted in the image above) and append it to the end of the new link. With the new format, any link you share will automatically download to your recipient’s computer.

via Lifehacker