Connecting Google Drive to freedam brings the folders your team already collaborates in into a real asset library — with previews, search, controlled metadata, and access rules — while Drive stays exactly as it is. freedam reads from Drive; it never writes back.

What it does

Google Drive is one of freedam's built-in Data Source connectors (Admin → Sources), alongside WebDAV and S3. You point a source at a Drive folder, and freedam ingests its files as assets. Like every freedam source, it is incremental rather than one-shot: on each refresh, new files are imported, files that changed in Drive become a new version of the existing asset, and files removed from Drive are handled by the deletion policy you pick — soft-archive (recoverable, and automatically restored if the file reappears) or additive (never remove anything).

A distinctive option for Drive sources: the catalog that drives file-to-record matching can be a Google Sheet. Where a WebDAV or S3 source reads a CSV or XLSX for its catalog, a Drive source can reference a Sheets file by ID — useful when the spreadsheet describing your products already lives in the same Drive.

How it works

The connection form takes three things:

• Access token — an OAuth access token with the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.readonly scope. Today you generate this token yourself (the documentation walks through doing it with Google's OAuth 2.0 Playground) and paste it into the form; freedam does not yet run the OAuth consent flow for you.
• Folder ID — taken straight from the folder's URL: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/<folder-id>.
• Catalog file ID — optional, the ID of a Google Sheets file to use as the catalog.

From there the source works like any other: map folders to collections, optionally match filenames against catalog rows so files inherit product metadata and hierarchy placement, preview where each file would land, run a small sample or a dry run first, and set a cron schedule for automatic refreshes. Run history, plain-language run outcomes, and the unmatched-files review workflow all apply.

Good to know

• Tokens are short-lived. Google OAuth access tokens expire after about an hour, so a manually supplied token needs replacing before then — a real constraint for scheduled syncs today. freedam sends a notification when authentication failures are detected, and after three consecutive failed scheduled runs it disables the source rather than filling the run log with noise; re-enable it after updating the token.
• The scope is read-only. drive.readonly is all freedam requests — it cannot modify or delete anything in your Drive.
• The same safety stops apply as for other connectors: a refresh that sees the folder listing shrink by more than half pauses for review instead of mass-archiving, and only one run executes per source at a time.
• Configuring sources requires the admin.sources permission.

Source configuration, catalog mapping, and troubleshooting are covered in the documentation. Questions about running this against your own Workspace, or self-hosting? Get in touch.