Now comes the methods of converting this link to a direct download.

In the new window, make sure that the link is available for ‘Anyone with the link’.

Right Click on your file and select ‘Get Link’.

There are many reasons why creating a direct link to a file is useful, and luckily there is an easy way to do this. Second, from a personal stand point, being able to send a file and not have to worry about if the receiver can figure out how to download it is a major plus. If I send a customer a link to their product, I expect that when they click on that link that the file will be downloaded, not previewed. I am sorry, but I personally run a ‘keep it simple’ mentality when it comes to my business. This causes extra confusion and an extra step to obtain that the customers need to figure out just to obtain their file. It is even worse when the file the customer is downloading is not even downloaded right away, instead it is first previewed by Google Drive.

They click on the Google Drive link and are greeted with this (image to the right).įirst off, from a business stand point, it is very unprofessional when your customers have to be redirected from your page to Google Drive. Now we can share the link out and the video will start at that specific moment.There are some people that use Google Drive as a gateway to larger files for their clients (like we do), or sometimes you just want an easy way to send someone a file. To start the video at a specific point, we add /view?t=1m20s where 1m20s means we want to start the video at 1 minute, 20 seconds.

The link will look something like this and automatically be shared for viewing by everyone with the link: You do that by right-clicking on the video and selecting Get Shareable Link. To create a link to start at an appropriate moment, we first have to get a link to the video. It turns out that the Google Drive not only looks like the Youtube player, but also accepts some of the same parameters. I’ve talked about using Google Drive to store videos for your class, and today I want to show you how you can form a link to a video so it starts playing at a specific time.

How to make google drive url