Google Drive is a great place to store files, but in order to store files on Google Drive, you’ll need to know how to upload them to Google Drive. But don’t worry, because in this article, that’s exactly what I’m going to show you how to do.
Prefer to watch a video about how to upload a file to Google Drive? Click here.
Here, I’m going to show you how to upload files to Google Drive from your computer, but if you want to upload files to Google Drive from your Android phone or tablet, you’ll want to read this article instead.
How To Upload A File To Google Drive
To upload a file to Google Drive from your computer, you’ll first need to go to drive.google.com and sign in with your Google account if you haven’t already.
Now, once you’re in Google Drive, all you’ll need to do is click on the button in the top left corner that says “New”…
And then, in the menu that appears, click “File upload”.
Now, it will open up a file selector, and you’ll need to find the file on your computer that you want to upload and double click on it to upload it.
This part might look slightly different depending on what computer you’re using, but the general idea should be the same.
Once you double click on the file, it will immediately begin uploading to Google Drive, and you’ll see the upload progress in the bottom right hand corner.
The time it takes for the file to upload can vary greatly depending on things like the size of the file and the speed of your internet connection, it can be anywhere from practically instantaneous to even as long as a few hours.
But regardless of how long it takes, once it’s uploaded, you’ll see a green tick next to it in the bottom right hand corner.
And that’s all there is to it! You’re done! The file will now be somewhere in your Google Drive. It might not be at the top the page, so you might have to scroll down a bit to find it, but once you find it, you’ll be able to rename it, move it into different folders, or do whatever els you want with it, and then access it whenever you want it!
So that’s all great, but if you have a lot of files you want to upload to Google Drive, uploading them all one by one could take quite a while. But don’t worry, there are actually two different ways that you can upload multiple files to Google Drive all at once.
How To Upload Multiple Files To Google Drive
To upload multiple files to Google Drive, it’s actually a very similar process to uploading a single file. All you have to do is click on the button in the top left hand corner that says “New”…
And then, in the menu that appears, click “File upload” just like you would with a single file.
But now, in the file selector, instead of double clicking on a single file, you just need to select multiple files. As I said before, this part will look a bit depending on the computer you’re using, but the general idea should be pretty similar for everyone.
On almost all computers, if you want to select and upload a list of files all together, you can do that by single clicking (instead of double clicking) on the top file so that it’s selected…
And then, holding down the shift key on your keyboard, and single clicking on the bottom file.
Now, you can let go of the shift key, and the two files you clicked on and all the files in between will be selected. And to upload those selected files, you’ll just need to click on the button near the bottom right hand corner that says something like “Open”, “Select”, “Upload”, etc.
Now, all the files will begin uploading to Google Drive, and you’ll see them all listed in the bottom right hand corner of the screen along with the upload progress of each individual file.
It can take quite a while for all of the files to finish uploading, so you might even want to go and do something else and come back later.
But once they’re all uploaded, there will be a green tick next to each file, and it will say “8 uploads complete” (or however many files you uploaded). And now, all the files you selected will be uploaded to Google Drive!
How To Upload A Folder To Google Drive
If you have a folder on your computer with a whole lot of files inside it, and you want to upload that entire folder to Google Drive, you can actually do that quite easily as well.
You don’t have to upload all the files separately, and then create a new folder in Google Drive, and then move the uploaded files into the folder. Google has a really cool feature that allows you to just upload a folder as though it’s a regular file.
All you have to do is click on the “New” button in the top left hand corner just like before.
But this time, instead of clicking on “File upload”, click on “Folder upload”.
Now, a file selecter will open up just like usual, but this time, none of the single files will be visible, and instead of double clicking on a file to upload it, you’ll need to single click (rather than double click) on the folder you want to upload to select it.
And then click the button near the bottom right hand corner that says something like “Open”, “Select”, “Upload”, etc to begin uploading the folder and all the files inside it.
As always, this part might look a bit different depending on what computer you’re using, but the general process should be pretty similar.
Now, before the folder begins uploading, you may see a message asking if you’re sure you want to upload the folder and all the files inside it to Google Drive, but you’ll just need to click “Upload” to proceed.
Now, the folder and all the files inside it will begin uploading to Google Drive, and you’ll see the upload progress in the bottom right hand corner just like you would with a single file.
Then, once the upload is complete, there will be a green tick next to the folder, and that means the folder and all the files inside it are now on Google Drive.
So now, you’ll see the folder you uploaded is here with all the other folders in Google Drive.
And if you double click on it to go inside it, you’ll see all the files that were inside the folder on your computer are now inside the folder on Google Drive!
And that’s all there is to it! So whether you wanted to upload a single file, multiple files, or an entire folder of files to Google Drive from your computer, you now know how it’s done.
