I use Google Drive heavily: for the most part, I use it as cloud storage for my most important files (and I pay Google for 5 TB of storage, which seems endless and you can uncover even more storage space), and I also use it instead of Microsoft Office, as Sheets, Docs and Slides fulfills all of my productivity needs.
But with nearly 1 TB worth of files spread across thousands of files and folders on my Google Drive, it can get unwieldy to surface the files I need and when I need them.
That is, until I started using Drive in a smarter way by changing my Drive homepage to better surface suggestions, mastering “vibe searching”, which allows you to easily find a file via Gemini even if you have no idea what the file is called, and by utilizing colors and emojis to properly label folders. Here’s what to do.
Google Drive Is So Much Better When You Use These Extensions
You’re not using Google Drive to its full potential—yet.
Change your Google Drive homepage to show suggestions first
Use this special URL
By default when you open Drive, you are taken to the My Drive section, which is a crude listing of all of your files and folders, which isn’t ideal. Google Drive has a terrific suggestions engine that has almost a six-sense about what you are most likely to want to open at that time.
There’s a different URL (versus drive.google.com) which will force Drive to bring you directly to your suggestions, which is a much more efficient landing page for Google Drive than just going to drive.google.com. The URL you want is https://drive.google.com/drive/home, which you should set as your Google Drive bookmark (if you have one).
Set your Google Drive bookmark to drive.google.com/drive/home to go right to your suggestions which does a great job predicting which file you’re going to open
Learn how to “vibe search” with Gemini in Drive
You don’t need to remember file names anymore
Google Drive search, which is now powered by Gemini AI, is very powerful and no longer requires you to know the name of the file, or even the contents of the file. Just like you can now “vibe code” with AI, where you just write a prompt around what you’re feeling or thinking without knowing the technical details, you can now “vibe search” if you remember just a couple of details of what you’re looking for.
Like if you’re looking for the lease agreement for your apartment when you signed it in 2023, you can search for “find the lease agreement from 2023 that I signed.” Here are some other “vibe-search” examples:
- Find the W-2 tax form I uploaded a couple of years ago — I think it was from a previous job
- I bought a new monitor last year and saved the receipt to Drive. Find it.
- Find the permission slip or school form I scanned for my daughter last fall
- Find the photo I took of the whiteboard notes from the meeting I think from January 2025 or around then.
- Find the recipe I saved, I think it was for an Italian dish with salmon.
One of the best parts about vibe-searching is that Gemini will look inside the files in your Drive, even if you don’t know the contents. Like if you remember signing a new insurance policy, but if you search for “insurance” you get 47 results. A vibe-search query that helps you bring up your new insurance policy would be “Find my current car insurance policy — it should show my coverage limits, deductible, and the policy period.“
Use colors and emojis to label folders
Visual organization matters
The default gray icons in Drive aren’t especially helpful at helping you easily identify the folders you’re looking for.
You can use colors, and more recently, emojis, to help visually categorize your folders, and it makes a big difference (as you can see from the before and after above). To change the color of a folder, right click on it, or click the three dots > Organize > Pick a color.
How to copy an emoji
To use in folder names in Google Drive
To add an emoji to your folder (or file) names (and you can place the emoji before or after the text, depending on what looks best for you), you can just search Google for the emoji you want (like “camera emoji”) and click “copy” on the Google search results page.
Then, go to the Google Drive folder you want to add the emoji to, click the three dots > rename > paste the emoji.
Take control of Google Drive
Don’t just use it as a file dumping ground
Storage space has gotten so cheap that it’s tempting to just dump all your files in Drive and call it a day. While you can certainly do that, just be aware of the many tools you have, like vibe-searching and going to the best Google Drive homepage with suggestions, which will make your life a lot easier when it’s time to find files you need.
However, if you don’t want to rely on Google but instead have your own cloud storage solution, you have options.
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