Shared Drives

The difference from personal storage is ownership. A file in someone's My Drive belongs to that person, even when it is shared with the team. A file in a shared drive belongs to the organisation, and access is granted by shared drive membership.

Google shared drives: roles and ownership

Each member of a Google shared drive has one of five roles:

Role	Can do
Manager	Everything, including managing members and settings
Content manager	Add, edit, move and delete files
Contributor	Add and edit files, but not move or delete them
Commenter	Comment on files
Viewer	View files

Workspace administrators decide who may create shared drives and whether people outside the organisation can be added. When a member's account is deleted, the files they added stay in the shared drive.

Google shared drive limits

Google publishes its limits in its shared drive limits, storage and upload limits and file version history pages:

Limit	Value
Items per shared drive	500,000, counting files, folders, shortcuts and items in the trash
Nested folder depth	100 levels
Members per shared drive	600 (groups plus individuals), up to 50,000 individuals
Groups a single file can be shared with	100
Upload and copy per user	750 GB in 24 hours, across My Drive and shared drives
Maximum file size	5 TB
Storage	Pooled across the organisation, by edition and number of users
Versions of uploaded files	"might be permanently deleted after 30 days or if there are 100 newer versions", unless marked Keep forever

When a shared drive reaches 500,000 items, no more can be added. The remedy is to move files out or split the content across several shared drives. The published limits guide works through each figure with examples from media libraries.

What shared drives do well

Shared drives are the right place for working files: project folders, editable design and video files, drafts, and documents several people edit together. Storage is included in licences most companies already pay for, permissions follow team membership, and office documents are searchable by their text.

What shared drives do not do for marketing images

A marketing image library asks different questions of its storage. These are the gaps that appear first:

• Search by description. Drive search covers file names, owners, dates, file types and document text. Drive reads camera data from photos but has no field for the caption, keywords or creator a photographer writes into the file. See finding images in cloud storage.
• Rights. There is nowhere to record a licence end date, territory or model release against a file, and nothing that stops a download when the licence has ended. See image rights in shared drives.
• Sizes and formats. Each person resizes and exports their own copy, so the folder fills with variants that drift apart.
• Permanent versions. For uploaded images, the version history above is a recovery tool with an expiry, not a record of which file was approved.
• External access by audience. Sharing a folder with a distributor gives them everything in it, at full size.

A typical case: a B2B software company keeps customer logos, event photos and product screenshots in a shared drive. Sales cannot tell which customer logos they have permission to use, the events team cannot find last year's photos without knowing the folder, and the website uses a screenshot that was replaced twice since.

Shared drives in Freedam

Working files can stay on the shared drive. Freedam holds the approved images and finished files that people outside the design team need.

• An administrator can connect a Google Drive folder as a data source. Freedam reads from it and never writes back. Each refresh downloads only what changed: new files are added, changed files become a new version of the same asset, and files removed from Drive are archived by default, so they can be restored if they reappear.
• Folders can be mapped to collections, and a CSV or XLSX catalogue in the same location can supply metadata for each file.
• Imported files go through the same steps as uploads: Exif and IPTC data are read, previews are generated, and AI adds tags, a caption and the text in the image.
• Once in the asset library, images carry rights policies, download in the sizes each person may have, and keep their version history.

See Freedam vs Google Drive and the guide to migrating from cloud storage to a DAM.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a shared drive and My Drive?

Files in My Drive belong to the person who created them, even when shared. Files in a shared drive belong to the organisation, so they stay when a member leaves, and access comes from membership of the shared drive.

How many files can a Google shared drive hold?

500,000 items, counting files, folders, shortcuts and anything in the trash. Folders can be nested up to 100 levels deep.

Is a shared drive enough for marketing images?

For a small library used by one team, often yes. When people outside the team need to find images by content, check usage rights or download different sizes, a shared drive needs a media library alongside it.