Google Drive is a wonderful place to store all your files online. But if you have a zip file in Google Drive that you want to unzip, it can be a real pain to have to download the file to your computer, unzip the file there, and then re-upload all the contents of the zip file to Google Drive.
Not only is it frustrating and time-consuming, but if the zip file is quite large or your internet connection is a bit slow, you could be waiting hours for all the downloading and re-uploading to finish. And if your ISP limits the amount of data you can use per month, you might even get charged extra fees in your next bill.
But fortunately, there is actually a fairly quick and easy way that you can unzip zip files on Google Drive without having to do any downloading or re-uploading! You just click a few buttons and all of a sudden the files that were inside your zip file will be in a folder in Google Drive.
If you want to unzip files in Google Drive like this, keep reading to learn how!
Prefer to watch a video about how to unzip files in Google Drive? Click here.
How To Open A Zip File In Google Drive
The first thing you’ll need to do is find your zip file in Google Drive. To do this, go over to https://drive.google.com/ and sign in with your Google account if you’re not already signed in.
Then just go to wherever your zip file is. It might be in a folder, but mine is just here in “My Drive”.
Once you’ve found it, you’ll need to double click on it so that you can see the contents inside it.
Now you will be able to see all the files that are inside the zip file, but you won’t actually be able to open them, move them, download them, rename them, or anything like that. In order to use the files like any other files in your Google Drive, you’ll need to extract the zip file.
To do this, click on “Open With” at the top of the screen.
And then, in the menu that appears, click on “Zip Extractor”.
You will then be taken to “Zip Extractor” which is a website that will unzip the file for you. But in order for it to work, you will need to give it access to your Google Drive files (you only have to do this the first time you use it). So click on the “Authorize ZIP Extractor” button to give it access.
Then you’ll be taken to a Google Authorization page where you’ll need to click on the Google Account that you want to connect. (If you have multiple Google accounts, make sure you choose the one that the zip file is in).
Then you will see a page asking you if you want to allow Zip Extractor to access the files in your Google Drive. The only way to proceed is to click on “Allow” at the bottom of the page, so scroll down and click “Allow”.
The window will then close and Zip Extractor will have access to your Google Drive. Now that that’s all done, you should now be back at the Zip Extractor homepage and it should now be giving you the options to “Open ZIP From Computer”, “Open ZIP From Google Drive”, or “Create New ZIP”.
You could use the “Open ZIP From Google Drive” option now but if you do that you would have to find the zip file again, so the easier option (now that Zip Extractor has access to Google Drive) is to just close this tab, go back to Google Drive, and click “Open With” followed by “Zip Extractor” again.
But this time, it should take you straight to a page that shows you the contents of your zip file. You now have the option to uncheck certain files that are inside the zip file if you only want to extract certain files from the zip.
And then once you’re happy with your selection, click on the “Extract”, and it will begin unzipping your file(s).
The extraction process might take even up to a minute or two if you have a lot of large files inside it, but then once it’s done it will say “Extraction complete”, and there will be a “View Files” button in the top right corner.
Click on “View Files” and it will automatically take you to where your extracted files are in Google Drive.
Now the files that we’re trapped in the zip folder are now just like regular files in your Google Drive ready for you to view, rename, share, download, or whatever you want to do with them.
How To Find Your Unzipped Files
After you unzip your files in Google Drive, you can just click that button to be taken straight to the files which is great if you just want to view them then and there, but if you want to come back at a later date and access those files, you’ll need to know where to look.
Your unzipped files will be located inside a folder in whatever location the zip file originally was. So if the zip file you unzipped was just in “My Drive”, the folder containing the unzipped files would also be in “My Drive”. But if the zip file was in some other folder in your Google Drive, the folder containing the unzipped files would be inside that other folder.
The name of the folder that the unzipped files are in will also be based on the zip file. The folder will be named “Your Zip File.zip (Unzipped Files)”.
So for example, the zip file I just extracted was inside “My Drive”, and it was named “Timmy’s Zip File”. This means the folder containing the unzipped files will be located in “My Drive”, and named “Timmy’s Zip File.zip (Unzipped Files)“.
And that’s all there is to it! You now know how to unzip files in Google Drive and how to find the files after you do. Wasn’t that easier than downloading, unzipping, and then re-uploading?
