Chrome OS might be working on adding Google Drive’s “Share with others” feature right into the file manager app.

How often do you share Google Drive files?

How often do you share files or folders from your Google Drive? How often do you do this from a Chromebook?

At present, you can right-click any file or folder from the Files app and choose “Share with others”. This opens the Google Drive website. You can then customize your sharing options and enter email address or generate a shareable URL.

A code change that I spotted today might be changing this.

Share files and folders from the Files app

Google is adding a “Share Sheet” to Chrome OS as well. The Canary channel already has this working.

As you can see, this is still a work in progress. At present, I see only Nearby Share here.

Google might add Drive’s “Share with others” option here.

The code change request says:

“[Prototype] Add share with others for files in Google drive.”

You can already initiate sharing Drive files from the Files app. So, this has to be one of the two options.

It is either to add the “Share with others” option to the Share Sheet, or to make it easy to complete the sharing process without leaving the Files app.

Or, it could be both.

One more thing

You what’s going to be really cool?

Imagine this scenario. You took a screenshot or a photo using your Chromebook. By default, this is saved in the Downloads folder.

If you have to share this using Google Drive, you will have to move it to the Google Drive section, right-click and choose “Share with others”, and then complete the process on drive.google.com.

What if you can select any file and click the Share Sheet, and let Google upload it to Google Drive and let you generate a link to share your file?

Throw in a URL shortening service there, and you have something really useful.

Summary

A lot of what I explained here are educated guesses based on these code bits. It will be interesting to watch this feature develop into something really useful for all Chromebook users.

Do you think a feature like this will be useful? Let me know in the comments section.

Source: Chromium Gerrit.