Work with Google Drive folders

Hello guys,

I tried to work on my 3D projects inside the Google Drive folder, but Autodesk Maya (or Blender) can’t find the file path.

There’s some type or workaround this this problem? Instead of working with local files I’d like to work directly on the GDrive folder.

Thanks in advance.

There is no good way to do that with (at least with gio mounts), because in Google Drive multiple files can have the same name. So to avoid overlaps they can only be represented as their IDs in the local filesystem. While gio applications can work around this by also using the specified display-name, that’s not an option for non-gio apps, like the two you mentioned. That being said it is not impossible and the following steps should allow you opening files:

  • Make sure gvfsd-fuse is installed and running
  • Open the google drive folder in nautilus and copy the file you want to open
  • Run gio info "PASTE_THE_COPIED_PATH_HERE" and copy the local path from that output
  • Paste that local path into the file open dialog of the app

If the apps don’t claim to support opening URIs, opening the file from nautilus might also work. Check the Exec key of the corresponding .desktop file in /usr/share/applications. If it contains a %u or %U, that means it supports opening URIs and will get a gio URI when opening a Google Drive file from Nautilus. In that case you can try copying the .desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications and change this to a %f or %F respectively. This indicates that this program can only handle local files and Nautilus should do the translation when opening such a file with that program.

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