It's Just broken: Google Drive

I am introducing a new series called "It's Just Broken". It's as the name implies.
First up is Google Drive. I work as a photo editor and since a bunch of my clients can't follow simple instructions, like use my portal, to save you storage and me time. I have to interact with the complete pile cluster-fuck that is Google Drive from time to time.

The Good:

So for the positives, it doesn't harass you to make an account every time you do anything with it like Dropbox does. Yes, the standards online are actually in hell. And its integration into Gmail is shockingly nice with it auto-attaching things to email. That's about it.

Now for the bad stuff:

Where is my file? Instead of having a standard filesystem you have whatever Google cooked up in their labs. Is it in your folder? A shared folder? A shared folder imported into your drive? Who the fuck knows? Maybe it's in your computers folder. You better pray that the search works! In shocking news it doesn't anymore unless you use Gemi-slop integration to search.

More importantly downloads: has a Google dev ever once used a Google Drive download? My guess is not. You know what should work well for a clouds storage drive? Downloading the damn files. But Google Drive is stuck in this literal hellhole of making 50 2 GB zips. I understand that browsers time-out quite a bit. But there should be an option for those of us who use download managers/ have a stable connection to increase that size. But nooooo 50 zips here you go bud, you better pray they all come down. Half the time your download manager can't even catch that many downloads, so it gets split up between your browser and download manager. Did I mention if you use Google drive desktop you cannot choose to sync a shared folder unless you import it into your drive, so your completely stuck in zip hell.

So Google's online file manager is unable to organize files and unable to download them. You had one.... erm two jobs and it can't do either.

I finally found this thing called Airdrive today that seems to work for now but this is actually insane for online storage in 2026.

This is day 15 of #100DaysToOffload