Using Google Drive with Shareboxed

Uploads go from your Mac straight to your Google Drive. Nothing passes through our service, nothing is encrypted on the way in, and the files land under their own names in a folder you can open in Drive like any other.

Connecting the account

Press Connect… in the connection settings. Your browser opens on Google's own consent screen. Shareboxed never sees your password, and there is nothing to paste back: the answer comes back to a port on your own Mac, which the app opens for that moment and closes again.

What Google asks you to allow is one permission, drive.file:

See, edit, create and delete only the specific Google Drive files you use with this app.

That is the whole of Shareboxed's reach into your Drive. Files you did not upload with Shareboxed are invisible to it, not "we promise not to look", but "Google does not answer". The same applies to the folder: Shareboxed can open the one it made, and knows nothing about the rest.

Press Test Connection afterwards. It refreshes the token and asks Drive which account it belongs to, which proves the whole chain in one round trip.

Connecting again is how you repair a connection someone revoked, or move it to a different Google account. Pressing Change… is safe at any time: it replaces the stored token and touches nothing you have uploaded.

Where the files go

In My Drive, with one folder per upload session named with the date down to the second:

My Drive/
  2026-08-18 16-30-00/
    holiday photos/
      a.jpg
      b.jpg

Drive is happy to keep two files with the same name in one folder, which is worse than overwriting, nobody can tell them apart afterwards. So a batch that contains two files called report.pdf gets report 2.pdf, the way Finder numbers a copy.

Taking a file back out of a bucket before it is sealed deletes it from Drive again.

What it costs

Uploads count against the storage of the Google account you connected, the same as anything else you put in Drive. Shareboxed does not clean up after itself: what you upload stays until you remove it.

No shareable links

The Sharing switch is not offered for this connection. Drive can hand out a link of its own, but it is a google.com link with Google's rules on it. Not a password we made, not a page we serve, and nothing we could revoke for you. Putting that behind the same switch as a Shareboxed link would mean one control making two different promises.

Share from Drive itself (right-click a file or the session folder → Share), or use an S3 or Cloudflare R2 connection when you want Shareboxed to hand you a password-protected link at the end of an upload.

When something does not work

Press Test Connection first. What it can say:

One more that only shows up later:

• Uploads stop with Insufficient storage: the Google account is out of storage. Free space at Google, or connect another account.