Google Drive Rant

[harrisonjr98]

As it stands, Google could be providing the greatest batch of cloud services around. Keyword "could". I've been a power user of Drive and it's related services since Google Docs first hit the mainstream. I always loved the constant updates the services saw, and the ease of uploading a variety of different formats. Recently, however, there has been a lot of crap going on. Google Play Music for example. 50,000 songs I can upload for free? Awesome. Too bad the click and drag way of uploading almost always produces duplicates in the library, and often misses files. Too bad i can't add at last a viewable version of my music library to my Drive, which I would like to use as similarly to Windows Explorer as possible. Google Photos recently got an overhaul. Okay, cool. Interesting- the web design doesn't resemble any of the other google services. Similar to how Drive looks a bit different than gmail, and a lot different than Google music. Alright, free uploads under 16 megapixels? Awesome, the perfect way to store all of the photos I take with my phone! Too bad the upload system is incredibly wonky and filled with bugs, and the functionality that allows google photos to be viewed in Drive only works about half the time and seemingly forgets that I have arranged them into albums. What's more, I was perfectly content uploading photos straight into Drive and viewing/downloading them for editing as necessary. Too bad the free <16MP storage only applies to "Google Photos." Sometimes, even Docs that I've deleted won't stop showing up in Drive for months. What is going on, Google? Get it together. Get one team on it. Keep the web design consistent and fluid as well as functional. Make a Google Drive that has Docs, Photos, Videos, and Music within one big view and allows the user to fully invest in the cloud. Not some weird, buggy bullshit. /endrant

[flibberdipper]

I've never had any problem with drive, other than the fact that it's a little derpy and slow, especially when working with documents, presentations, and so on.

[harrisonjr98]

I've never had any problem with drive, other than the fact that it's a little derpy and slow, especially when working with documents, presentations, and so on.

I do have to add that the many problems that I have are largely due to the fact that I am trying to fully move personal storage into the cloud, using local drives for things I don't want across all devices. For casual use, a user may not have as many problems. That being said, I believe google themselves believe that a user should be able to invest fully in drive as a platform, so I still think it's rational to hold them to it 

[improbablepants]

My main beef with drive is that it doesnt have native support for .zip, .7z or .rar. It should. There is no reason it cannot, and I use these for quick uploads a lot of the time. Also, you dont overwrite files when you drag the same thing over it duplicates. That would be fine, but the name stays the same, you dont know what is what.

 

Dont get me wrong tho, drive is awesome. I use group collaboration almost everyday for peer editing and divide&conquer with classwork or notes. Cloud is also great

[ReadyToGame]

If there are documents showing up after you have deleted them it is because you either did not properly delete them, or it is because you did not empty the trash bin.

 

Google photos is a newer service and you really need to wait for things to be worked out. If you want a different service to host your images on then I suggest maybe using dropbox, rather than relying on a newer service and not expecting bugs. You cannot expect there to be no bugs with a newer service.

 

Google is revamping a lot of things, and changing the design, and of course across all of the service things will be different, they're not meant to be the same, they just keep similar designs aspects, they are not going to be the EXACT same design or layout, because that would just be silly. 

 

Things will be different from browser to phone/tablet/android TV. You cannot expect cross-platform uniformity, as it is just not possible, or it won't look good. With google apps, which I think you are referring to when you say other platforms, or "other google services" is because the apps go for the material design to coincide with the new material design in android, is not carried over to the computer versions because it wouldn't fit with anything else on the computer, and it looks perfectly fine in the browser.

 

Drag and drop for music will be buggy, maybe try uploading it another way? Like mass upload through file explorer?

 

Just my counter arguments because I feel that some of your views are because you are ignorant to certain parts of Google Drive.

[harrisonjr98]

If there are documents showing up after you have deleted them it is because you either did not properly delete them, or it is because you did not empty the trash bin.

 

Actually, what I'm referring to is the "phantom files" bug that is known and has persisted for years.

 

 

Google photos is a newer service and you really need to wait for things to be worked out. If you want a different service to host your images on then I suggest maybe using dropbox, rather than relying on a newer service and not expecting bugs. You cannot expect there to be no bugs with a newer service.

 

Of course there will be bugs with a newer service. My problem is that they've divided a feature to two separate services and then made a buggy bastard child "feature" to try and remedy it.

 

 

Google is revamping a lot of things, and changing the design, and of course across all of the service things will be different, they're not meant to be the same, they just keep similar designs aspects, they are not going to be the EXACT same design or layout, because that would just be silly. 

 

I wouldn't expect the exact same design, but going from Drive to Photos, for example, the interface has a completely different design language and becomes distracting.

 

 

Things will be different from browser to phone/tablet/android TV. You cannot expect cross-platform uniformity, as it is just not possible, or it won't look good. With google apps, which I think you are referring to when you say other platforms, or "other google services" is because the apps go for the material design to coincide with the new material design in android, is not carried over to the computer versions because it wouldn't fit with anything else on the computer, and it looks perfectly fine in the browser.

 

I think you misunderstood me here, I was simply saying that I try to use cloud services to unify storage on my devices. I don't care if it looks the same from device to device.

 

Drag and drop for music will be buggy, maybe try uploading it another way? Like mass upload through file explorer?

 

There are ways around it, but it's still a problem that I'm trying to bring attention to