The Google Drive API lets you create apps that leverage Google Drive cloud
storage. You can develop applications that integrate with Drive,
and create robust functionality in your application using the
Drive API.
This diagram shows the relationship between your Drive app, the
Drive API, and Drive:
These terms define the key components shown in Figure 1:
- Google Drive
- Google's cloud file storage service provides users with a personal storage
space, called
My Drive
, and the option to access
collaborative shared folders, called
shared drives
.
- Google Drive API
- The REST API that lets you leverage Drive storage from
within your app.
- Google Drive app
- An app that leverages Drive as its storage solution.
- Google Drive UI
- Google's user interface that manages files stored on Drive.
If your app is an editor-type app, such as a spreadsheet or word processor,
you can integrate with the Drive UI to create and open files
within your app.
- My Drive
- A Drive storage location that a specific user owns. Files
stored on My Drive can be shared with other users, but
ownership of the content remains specific to an individual user.
- OAuth 2.0
- The authorization protocol that Google Drive API requires to authenticate your
app users. If your application uses
Sign In With Google
, it
handles the OAuth 2.0 flow and application access tokens.
- Shared drive
- A Drive storage location that owns files that multiple users collaborate on.
Any user with access to a shared drive has access to all files it contains.
Users can also be granted access to individual files inside the shared
drive.
What can you do with the Drive API?
You can use the Drive API to:
- Download files
from Drive and
upload files
to Drive.
- Search for files and folders
stored in Drive.
Create complex search queries that return any of the file metadata fields in
the
Files
resource.
- Let users
share files, folders, and drives
to collaborate on content.
- Combine with the
Google Picker API
to search
all files in Drive, then return the file name, URL, last
modified date, and user.
- Create
third-party shortcuts
that are external links to data stored outside of Drive, in
a different datastore or cloud storage system.
- Create a dedicated Drive folder to
store application-specific data
so the app cannot
access all the user's content stored in Drive.
- Integrate your Drive-enabled app with the
Drive UI
using the
Google Drive UI
. It's Google's standard web UI that you can
use to create, organize, discover, and share Drive files.
- Apply
labels
to Drive files, set label field values, read label field
values on files, and search for files using label metadata terms defined by
the custom label taxonomy.
To learn about developing with Google Workspace APIs, including handling
authentication and authorization, refer to
Develop on Google Workspace
.
To learn how to configure and run a simple Google Drive API app, read the
Quickstarts overview
.