If you are a business or a school that is a Google Workspace user, in addition to virtually unlimited storage, you have a great opportunity to use a Shared Drive option.
A shared drive is an organizational structure within Google Drive that lives parallel to My Drive. Shared drives support files owned by an organization rather than an individual user. An individual file may be organized within a shared drive or My Drive, but not both.
It means that the shared drive is not connected to any personal account within the organization. This fact has two major advantages:
First of all, in this way, you can avoid glitches that often arise in My Drive due to the lack of permissions.
Secondly, you do not have to move your entire database from one account to another if the key employee decides to leave the organization.
For this very reason, we highly recommend teams use Shared Drive with Pics.io. The best practice is to create a separate Shared Drive and provide Pics.io with access to it. In this case, you will not need to give access to the rest of your Google Drive.
NB! Pics.io works on top of a single folder that resides in a Shared Drive you want to connect to, not the whole Shared Drive.
How can I migrate data within Google Drive?
If your team plans to set up an account for future use with our DAM system, you might need to move data in one of these ways:
From an individual's My Drive to a shared drive within your organization.
From your organization's shared drive to an individual's My Drive.
Between two personal My Drive accounts.
For the first two data migration scenarios, you'll need to add the relevant individual's Google account to the shared drive. This Google account is the one from or to which the data will be moved.
The next steps are:
Create a Shared Drive if you plan to move data to the new one;
Locate and make the right-mouse click on the folder you want to migrate and select 'Move to'.
NB! Make sure you have permission to move files into Shared Drives. DO NOT reupload files.
It is important to save Google Drive IDs on the files so that Pics.io can track them.Once the data migration is completed, log in to your Pics.io library, and change either the Google account used for the authorization or the working folder.
If you need assistance with transferring files to a different account or want to ensure all your current information in Pics.io is preserved, please feel free to reach out to us at support@pics.io or via chat for additional guidance.
Are there any limitations on using Shared (Team) Drive in Pics.io?
Pics.io doesn't have any limitations on the number and size of assets you store. However, there are some limits on Shared Drive's side:
To link a folder from a Shared (Team) Drive to Pics.io, the Google Workspace account used for authorization must be assigned as either a 'Manager' or a 'Content Manager' role;
If external users are added to shared drives, they won’t be able to link folders that are owned or created by other Google users. In the storage wizard, these users will not see the 'Shared Drive' tab. They can only find and link folders that they have created in that shared drive, and this can be done by using the search function.
It's restricted to upload more than 400,000 files and folders by default (please contact Google Workspace support if you might need to know whether it is possible to increase this limit for your Workspace account);
The maximum size of one single asset should not exceed 5 TB;
A folder in a shared drive can support up to 20 levels of nested folders.
Feel free to check more details on the Shared Drive limitations here.
NB! Google My Drive does not have any limits on the number of items, including files, folders, and shortcuts that can be uploaded & stored.