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In Dropbox there is a place you can see all the shared items in your account (i.e., all the items you have granted others access to).

Is there a similar feature in Google Drive?

I'm not only trying to find items that are shared with other "named people", but also documents that are shared on a "anyone with link can view / edit" or "public on the internet" basis.

Franck's answer seemed to work back in 2013, but Google Drive's interface has changed quite a bit since, and I'm struggling to be able to perform the same task with the new interface. I wonder if anyone knows how to do it in the new interface.

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Search for to: to retrieve all documents shared with someone. You can also search by visibility:

enter image description here

For more information, see Search your Google Drive.

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  • Thanks Franck im trying to do another audit at the moment, but google drive have changed their search drop down, in the new drop down is there a way to filter by visibility like there was in the dropdown that you screenshoted above ? – sam Mar 3 '17 at 10:47
  • @sam sorry, no clue, I don't use Google Drive much, their user interface hurts my eyes. – Franck Dernoncourt Mar 3 '17 at 15:25
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    The to: operator worked well for me. To remove access, I also found it useful to search for to:person@domain.com -owner:person@domain.com as I can't otherwise revoke access from all the files. – pyrytakala Oct 10 '19 at 11:03
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+25

As of 2017, Google Drive does not have this feature built in. Limited functionality can be achieved using advanced search, however, that can be complicated, and still does not fully answer your question.

Instead, you can use WhoHasAccess.com. The interface is user-based, which means that instead of listing directly the files that are shared, it will list the people that the files are shared with. If you absolutely need a file by file based interface, this might not be the solution for you, but there's a lot of potential if you can work around that.

To start, go to WhoHasAccess.com, and click Scan my Google Drive now.

WhoHasAccess.com

Next, you'll need to give WhoHasAccess.com permission to view and manage your Google Drive files. Don't worry - after the scan is completed, they'll delete the collected data within 24 hours.

Grant Access

Next, you'll have to wait a few minutes, depending on how much stuff you keep in your drive. When the scan is finished, you'll see a page like the one below, and be able to manage who has access to what.

enter image description here

If That's Not Good Enough

A slightly more complicated method is available if you're more tech savvy, and/or need the information presented differently. @Tom Woodward left a comment above that you can run his Google Script, which will output a csv (Comma Separated Value) file, which is open-able in Excel.

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    To be honest, I would rather look all my files one by one than giving all kind of access permissions (read,write,delete for all files) to third party apps. – emre can Jan 5 '20 at 13:15
  • Is it safe to give access to this extension? – Melchia May 27 '20 at 10:47
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    Whether it's safe to give access is something you'll have to decide for yourself, but their privacy policy says that they don't share any of the information. Personally, that's good enough for me since they seem legit, but if you have super sensitive information on your Google Drive, that might not be the option for you. – Cullub May 27 '20 at 14:21
  • THIS SITE ROCKS. Why isn't this a built in feature of Google? and yes, the site obviously needs full permissions but it is very clear about what it's using,and deletes all data & permissions within 24 hours, unless you click the "forget me now" (or whatever) button at the bottom..... I was shocked to see all the crap I had shared with random people over the last 15 years. (Also found a bunch of cool stuff of mine, hidden away in subfolders, that I'd forgotten about!) – ashleedawg Jan 1 at 0:05
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I have modified the code provided by Tom Woodward in the comments. You can see it over here: https://gist.github.com/danjargold/c6542e68fe3a3b46eeb0172f914641bc

Tom's original code only scanned a single folder and one level down of subfolders. With my modification, it will scan your whole drive irrespective of the number of folders within folders you have. Take note that it will miss any loose files in your top/home folder. Another improvement I made was to only list files that are not PRIVATE.

To you use, simply:

  1. Create a new google sheet
  2. Select Tools -> Script Editor
  3. Copy the code from https://gist.github.com/danjargold/c6542e68fe3a3b46eeb0172f914641bc
  4. Save and run (click the play button)

Feedback is always appreciated :)

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  • Nice. What is missing in this approach: it's the capacity to handle big volume of files. It stops after 5-6 minutes otherwise. – Fedir RYKHTIK Jan 20 '20 at 16:48
  • Still works! +1 – feetwet Mar 20 '20 at 23:46
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As of May 2018 there is still no way to view this information via the Google Drive interface, other than going through the files individually. In addition, when using the Google Drive API in the standard way and searching for files that are public there is a bug which leads to inaccurate results (https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/72970146).

One way to get the information you need is to use Filewatch (https://filewatch.rekatsu.com), a free tool I made which scans your Google Drive and displays all of the files which are publicly available (shared with anyone on the web or anyone with the link). It scans all files which you have permission to share, including files you don’t own and files in team drives you have access to.

Go to Filewatch (https://filewatch.rekatsu.com), and click on ‘Connect service’ under Google Drive.

Filewatch

You’ll need to give permission for Filewatch to scan your files. Filewatch has been verified by Google, requests the minimum permissions necessary and no information about your files leaves your computer. You can also revoke the permissions at any time by clicking ‘Disconnect service’.

Filewatch permissions

Start the scan by clicking the ‘Find now’ button. Filewatch will scan your files and display the results to you. It only takes a few seconds. You’ll be able to see how many files were scanned and a list of the files which are publicly available. You can then review them and change the sharing settings if necessary.

Filewatch results

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  • for some reason, it only found 3 public files, but WhoHasAccess.com found about 20 (owned by me, not just those I have access to) – LogicDaemon Jan 29 '19 at 10:34
  • @LogicDaemon Thanks for trying Filewatch. I've done some testing and everything seems to be working as expected.Could I ask, when you say that WhoHasAccess.com found about 20, does that mean that it found 20 files in total or 20 files that are public (Public on the web or Anyone with the link)? – Alex Cason Jan 30 '19 at 12:28
  • 20 public for everyone. 9 more with the link. Here are screenshots: photos.app.goo.gl/8GHmyfLve4hZ6NgE8 (yes, I'm certain account is the same, PM me somewhere if I can help with diagnostics) – LogicDaemon Jan 30 '19 at 17:35
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    @LogicDaemon Thanks so much for the offer to help diagnosing the issue. If the offer is still open it's probably easiest if you email me at contact@filewatch.net. There's a couple of things we can check. – Alex Cason Feb 1 '19 at 11:02
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Two methods that are available (neither is ideal imo) is to:

  1. in google drive, switch to the listing view (instead of grid view). If an item is shared, there should be a small "two head" icon next to the name. If a folder is shared, there should be a "head" icon on the folder.

  2. Download / install the google drive sync application for your computer and open the resulting folder. Again, in detail view, you can add a column (right click on the header/title row) called "shared".

I'm not sure if these work for all combinations (non-shared folder containing shared file, link share vs. full share) but it does help. Really hoping Google will figure this out soon as this keeps our professional use to a minimum and using OneDrive instead.

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  • nice, didn't know about the additional column. – LogicDaemon Jan 30 '19 at 17:57
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I wrote a full python program to query the Google Drive API and audit Drive for sharing and many other file properties. It will dump "interesting" files and all folders to csv.

The CSVs display full folder information, including total numbers of all children and total size of all children in the directories. This is useful if you're near drive quota limit, or if you don't like that GoogleDriveUploader scans through 100k files every time your computer starts up. I'll hopefully augment it to enable users to programatically remove sharing on files.

I wrote this because I found that the gist didn't work well for huge numbers of files (I had in the 100Ks). I think there were also API limits, debugging the sheets API seemed to be difficult.

https://github.com/jsrozner/google_drive_auditer

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If you are a paid customer go to https://admin.google.com/u/1/ac/reporting/audit/drive?new=true and filter by "visibility: public on the web". There are of course several other criterias like the owner, previous visibility and beyond.

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