Downloading files that gdlink shortcuts point to

#1

I have a number of files which were shared with me via Google Drive - I have Google Drive Shortcuts that exist in my local Google drive.

InSync appears to just sync the shortcut as a .gdlink file. Is there a way to have InSync sync the actual file that the .gdlink file points to, rather than the .gdlink? It’s tedious to have to click on each .gdlink file manually, and then find and click on ‘download file’ from the Google Drive web page when there are hundreds of these symlinks in my Google drive.

I know rclone can download the actual files instead of the .gdlink files - I’m wondering if InSync can do the same.

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Gdlinks not working
#2

Hi @Troy_Telford :slight_smile: This is one of the requested features and I have sent this to our product team for consideration.

Just curious-- if the files are shared with you (assuming it’s on Shared with Me), what are the benefits of creating a shortcut and syncing it on your My Drive?

#3

Think of it this way: I get a link to a directory that’s shared with me. In that link are many large files. I only want a few of them, so I drag the ones I want to a folder on “my” drive – which creates the shortcuts in a directory on “my” google drive.

The whole point is to download the files I want, not every file in a directory that’s been shared with me. I also don’t want to deal with having to rename all of the files, which is what often happens if I copy the data instead of linking the file

It’s pretty important when my ISP is really strict about how much bandwidth I can use per month. I’d rather download 80 GiB, not 200 GiB.

#4

I see! We do have a feature that lets you sync files selectively. If you go to Shared with me and double-click to expand the folders, you can sync only the ones you need. If you want to sync multiple files at once, click on “cloud selective sync” on the upper right then expand the folders.

I hope that helps in the meantime! :slight_smile:

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#5

I also feel that’s important to have that feature – my friend shared photos with me and I want to use them in Adobe InDesign – but I need to go to the web browser (insync is not integrated in my macos shell) and then download files manually. I think that this workflow is not a smooth one :wink:

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#6

Thank you @Tomasz_Mirowski for sharing your thoughts! I will be forwarding this to our product team as feedback on how useful this feature would be for users like you!

#7

Absolutely, this feature is crucial. Having .gdlink links on a local drive doesn’t serve much purpose.

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#8

I don’t know if demand for this feature is the same as it was in '21 but I just worked out how to sync ‘shared with me’ files having faced this problem, and I can see the difficulty now. The reason for wanting .gdlink to be an actual folder is so that I can use my personal folder organization to find and work on files.

Somebody might share a folder with me called “leaflet design”, and my working files for that project may be in Insync Root > Client A > Project B > Material C

Placing the folder in that directory would be more convenient for me as it lets me find it more easily than just searching for “leaflet design” which may not be the only directory by that name and make working with my mix of personal and shared files easier in many ways, like being able to drag and drop my working files into that directory and visa-versa.

However I can see some major problems in implementation:

If the same folder is linked multiple times, there’s a risk of many duplicates being downloaded which is a very inefficient use of space.

Perhaps more dangerous: folders with links to each-other can be really useful for navigation but if somebody has used links that way and the automatic downloading of linked folders was implemented, even as an opt-in feature applied by accident, then presumably that would cause recursive downloading to infinity, as each linked folder would be treated as a sub-directory!

I feel like the two options are:

  1. Enable the downloading of linked folders only on a directory-by-directory basis, with no option for this option to be applied recursively to child directories, and make it users responsibility to decide which gdlink to treat as a directory and decide how they will manage duplicates. Or…
  2. For every linked directory not currently synced, keep the current behavior (i.e. provide a .gdlink file) but for every folder that is synced, be it another directory in ‘My Drive’ or a file/folder in ‘Shared with me’, create a native symlink to that file/directory instead of the .gdlink. Any new .gdlink pointing to the same location, will simply be a symlink to the equivalent local directory, eradicating the risk of duplicates or errors due to recursion.

Option 2 seems the most intuitive and I’d love to see it implemented!

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#9

Thank you for sharing this extremely detailed walkthrough of how the feature can be developed and implemented. I have shared this to our team – I cannot promise an ETA but this helps us further understand your Insync pain points which could drive our development efforts in the future.

If you have any further thoughts or questions, please don’t hesitate to post :slight_smile: