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As previously anticipated, Google's 25GB plan will no longer be available for new users. It was the most affordable storage plan: $2.49/month. Now the cheapest plan offers 100GB for $4.99/month, but it's shared storage that can be used in Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.

OLD:


NEW:


"Store up to 15GB in Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos, and then pay for additional storage as your account grows," informs Google. Paid storage no longer increases Gmail's storage limit to 25GB, but now the entire storage is shared between Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.

You can still find the old plans here, so I suggest to choose the 25GB plan if you need more storage because it will be removed soon. You'll also get some additional Gmail storage.

Existing users will keep the old plans. "If your account lapses, your credit card is declined, or you choose to change your storage plan in any way (upgrade or downgrade), you'll be asked to choose from among the new Google Drive storage plans. Once you choose a new plan, you'll no longer be able to switch back to the old one." I still have the plan that offered 20GB of storage for only $5/year.


{ Thanks, Florian K. }

You can now add images to Google Forms. Just click the "Insert" menu, select "Image" and upload the image you want to add. You can also select an image from Google Drive, Google+ Photos, take a snapshot, enter the URL or use Google Image Search to find the right image.


"Photos can be resized, centered, or swapped out for another photo with just a few simple clicks," informs Google. You can also enter an image title and a hover text.

It's another feature that makes Google Forms more useful, just like the new question types for date and time. Next up: rich-text editing.

Until now, Gmail offered 10GB of free storage and Google Drive/Google+ Photos only 5GB of free storage. Offering more storage for email than for storing files doesn't make a lot of sense. That's probably the reason why Google decided to share the storage for Gmail and Google Drive, so that you have a single free storage limit: 15 GB. Google Apps for Business/Education offers 30GB of free storage.

"With this new combined storage space, you won't have to worry about how much you're storing and where. For example, maybe you're a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2 GB in Gmail. Now it doesn't matter, because you can use your storage the way you want," explains Google.

There's also a new interface for the Google Storage page:


But what if you've purchased additional Drive storage? That storage is now shared between Google Drive, Google+ Photos and Gmail, but it's not clear what happens to the bonus Gmail storage. Google says "you're no longer limited to a 25 GB upgrade in Gmail — any additional storage you purchase now applies there, too". Does this mean there's no longer extra Gmail storage when you buy Drive storage?

Apparently, Google dropped the 25GB upgrade option for $2.49/month and "plans start at $4.99/month for 100 GB". If you still see the old Google Storage page and you intend to use this option, upgrade now.

And here's an idea: why not store all Gmail attachments in Google Drive and offer free storage for Gmail messages (text-only)?

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Google Forms added two new question types for dates and time. There's a pretty useful date picker, but you can also enter dates manually. You can customize the time questions and enable "duration" to ask questions like "how much time a day do you spend on Facebook every day?".

To add a question to your form, click the arrow next to the "Add item" button and select "date" or "time" from the list of question types.



If you're wondering what's next for Google Forms, the source code reveals that Google will add support for rich-text editing, embedding images and that Google Forms will integrate with Fusion Tables and Google Scripts (codename "maestro").


{ Thanks, Herin and Daniel. }

Google has a very cool feature that restricts search results to pages that include tables. The snippets are table rows and you can import the tables to Fusion Tables.

"Google Tables allows you to search across public Fusion Tables and millions of web pages with data presented in a table. Once you find the right table, you can import the data to Fusion Tables for filtering, visualizations, collaboration, downloads, and access with the Fusion Tables API," informs Google.



There's a search box for this feature when you create a Fusion Table file, but Google Table Search is also useful as a standalone feature. It's interesting that there are a lot of Wikipedia pages that show up in the search results and a search for [the] returns about 39 million results (vs 25 billion web search results).

{ Thanks, Florian K. }

Speaking of new-style packaged apps for Chrome, here's a new app: Google Keep. It's another way to access the recently launched service for taking notes.


The app looks just like the Google Keep site, but it works offline. This means that you can access your notes or create new notes even if you don't have an Internet connection. Unfortunately, you can't insert images when you're offline. Another limitation is that new notes aren't uploaded in the background when you're back online, so you need to open the app.


{ via Chrome Blog }

The latest Google Search update removed a very useful feature: quick view. The link was displayed next to PDF files and Microsoft Office files and allowed you to open them in the Google Drive Viewer.


Here's how Google described Quick View: "Annoyed by pop ups requesting you to download a specific software or plugin to visualize a document? Google Docs allows you to view any document directly from the search results without requiring any plugins. Just search for a document, for example [white paper on cloud computing] and then click on 'Quick View' to see the document in Google Docs."


If you don't want to download the file, you can click the green arrow and select "cached", but this shows a text-only version of the document that doesn't preserve formatting.

Please note that the feature has nothing to do with the "quick view" for mobile phones.

Last year, Google acquired Quickoffice, a mobile app for editing Microsoft Office files. The app is still available and it's not free. It's probably the only mobile Google app that's not free (there's a free version for Google Apps for Business users).

Google started to port Quickoffice to Chrome OS, first as a Microsoft Office viewer. Now the Office viewer is available as an extension for Chrome. It requires at least Chrome 27.0.1453.65 for Windows and Mac, so you can use it if you have Chrome Beta, Chrome Dev Channel, Chrome Canary or a recent Chromium build.

The extension lets you open Microsoft Office files that have the following extensions: .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. It looks just like the PDF viewer, but it doesn't work as well yet probably because it's still in beta. Some files don't load, text selection doesn't work for presentations and zooming some documents sends you to a different page.


But why not open these files using Google Drive apps? Why not use the Google Drive Viewer? They're great options, but the Chrome Office Viewer is better than the Google Drive Viewer because it doesn't convert files to images. Opening files using Google Drive apps like Google Docs or Google Sheets takes more time: the files need to be downloaded and then converted to the Google Drive format. Another explanation: "Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats" and this is especially important for business users. The viewer works offline, so Chromebook users can open Office files from a USB flash drive even when they don't have an Internet connection.

To test the extension, search Google for [fileype:doc essay], [fileype:ppt internet history], [fileype:xls gdp].

{ via Chrome Blog }

Do you remember the post about the animal icons from Google Drive? They're only displayed for anonymous users ("people who are not given explicit access"). For everyone else, Google will show the Google Profile photo and link to the Google+ page.


There's also a group chat feature powered by Google Talk/Chat. It's a simplified version of the chat feature from Gmail, Google+, iGoogle and orkut. There's only one chat box that lets you talk with the other signed-in users that edit or just view a document, presentation or any other file. For some reason, it doesn't work in Google Sheets/Spreadsheets.

"To begin a group chat with everyone viewing the document, click the Chat button, which you'll find in the top-right corner of your window. A chat box will appear at the bottom of your file, and everyone who's viewing the document and who's signed in with a Google account will be included in the group chat," explains Google.


The group chat feature from Google Drive doesn't support voice or video chat, conversations aren't saved in Gmail and they're not available in other services that use Google Chat. "If you've chatted in Gmail and Google+, you may have noticed that a chat started in Gmail will carry over into Google+, and vice versa. The same isn't true for chats in Google Drive. Chats you start in Google Drive won't carry over into other Google products, and chats you start in other products won't appear in Google Drive."

{ via Google Drive Blog }

Google found a funny way to show the anonymous persons who open a document in Google Drive. Instead of only using different colors for each person, Google Drive associates each person with an animal, so you'll see things like "anonymous anteater", "anonymous moose", "anonymous chupacabra", "anonymous axolotl", "anonymous kraken", "anonymous gopher", "anonymous jackalope". Google also uses special icons for each animal.

For the moment, this only works for PDF files, photos, videos and other files that can't be edited using Google's apps.


To test this feature, click a random photo from this folder and click the "open" button.




Here's the list: alligator, anteater, armadillo, auroch, axolotl, badger, bat, beaver, buffalo, camel, chameleon, cheetah, chipmunk, chinchilla, chupacabra, cormorant, coyote, crow, dingo, dinosaur, dolphin, duck, elephant, ferret, fox, frog, giraffe, gopher, grizzly, hedgehog, hippo, hyena, jackal, ibex, ifrit, iguana, koala, kraken, lemur, leopard, liger, llama, manatee, mink, monkey, narwhal, nyan cat, orangutan, otter, panda, penguin, platypus, python, pumpkin (sic!), quagga, rabbit, raccoon, rhino, sheep, shrew, skunk, slow loris, squirrel, turtle, walrus, wolf, wolverine, wombat. Missing anything?

{ Thanks, Yu-Hsuan Lin. }

Google Drive's shared folders have a new "grid view" interface that borrows the file preview feature from the standard GDrive UI. It's great for sharing photos, but it also works for other files.

"Over the next week, users who are invited to open a shared folder will notice a much improved visual layout of the folder's contents. You can even click on an item to preview and flip between the content. Want to keep the shared folder? Use the 'Add to Drive' button on the top right to store it directly in your Drive for fast access across all devices," informs Google.

Here's an example of shared folder (Android wallapapers):


And here's the old interface:


You can open any folder in the new interface. Just replace https://drive.google.com/#folders/FOLDERID or https://docs.google.com/folder/d/FOLDERID/edit with https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=FOLDERID, where FOLDERID is a long ID.

The new UI is better suited for quickly previewing files, while the old was great for switching between multiple documents and editing them. Google Drive seems to focus more on consuming content than producing it, a departure from the Google Docs heritage.

I wonder if Google Drive will start to include the photo albums from Picasa Web and Google+ Photos. This would make GDrive less disjointed.

{ Thanks, +Cougar Abogado. }

Google Keep has been launched: it's Google's latest attempt to create a service for taking notes. Unlike Google Notebook, Keep is a Google Drive app (the Drive integration is not yet ready for public release), it doesn't have a rich-text editor and it's optimized for mobile.

There's an Android app and a desktop site. Both use the sticky notes metaphor and you can choose the color for each note, add text, images, lists and voice recordings that are automatically converted to text in the mobile app. Both interfaces let you choose between the grid view and the list view.



Google Keep lacks many of the features that were available in Google Notebook: labels, sorting, comments, multiple notebooks, rich-text editor, sharing. It looks like a lightweight Google Notebook for mobile devices.

"With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what's important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand," informs Google.

It's likely that each Google Keep note will be a file in Google Drive, so you'll be able to share it with other people, add it to a folder, download it etc.

For now, Google Keep is the only Google Drive service that has more features in the Android app than in the desktop interface.


{ Thanks, Sterling. }

Carlos Jeurissen found some interesting hints about a new Google Drive app called Keep. There are multiple references to Google Keep in the GDrive code, including some URLs like: https://drive.google.com/keep/?note. In fact, the codename for Google Keep is "memento" and the MIME type for Google Keep files is "application/vnd.google-apps.note". Obviously, Google Keep is a replacement for Google Notebook, a service that has been discontinued back in 2009.


Carlos also found the service's icon and a short URL that redirects to the Play Store page for a non-existent Google Keep app.


Google has a cool Chrome extension called Scratchpad. It's great for taking notes and it syncs with Google Docs. Let's hope that Keep is better than both Scratchpad and Google Notebook.

Update: Android Police has some screenshots of the new service.

{ Thanks, Carlos. }

When you can use Google Music to store 20000 songs, Google+ Photos to store an unlimited number of photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes, YouTube to store all your videos, Gmail to store 10GB of messages and attachments and when the files converted to the Google Drive formats don't count towards the Google Drive storage, what are the use cases for the Google Drive storage and why would you buy extra storage?


You could use it to store the original photos, PDF files, store documents/spreadsheets/presentations without importing them into Google Docs, backup all your files, but the most popular file types are already covered. Google wanted to encourage people to use Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Music, Google+ and free storage was an important selling point.

The trouble with Google Drive is that Google has a lot of other services that are better suited for storing your files and Drive doesn't even integrate with those services. When your photos are in Google+ Photos, your videos are uploaded to YouTube and your music is in Google Music, Google Drive feels like an afterthought, not the "go-to place" for uploading your files.

If you thought that you can upload videos to Google Drive and embed them into your site just like you can do with YouTube videos, think again. I've uploaded a video to Google Drive, added the embed code to a blog post and after a few hundred views, the video stopped playing. Here's the Google Drive error message: "Unable to play this video at this time. The number of allowed playbacks has been exceeded. Please try again later."

As you can see, even the video player from Google Drive has been removed:


After deleting the embed code from the blog post, Google no longer displayed the error message and the video started to play again.

Jérôme Flipo spotted a new GDrive feature in an animated GIF file shared by the Google Drive team: a "Gmail attachments" section.


It turns out that there are many references to Gmail attachments in Google Drive's code, so this new feature is not yet enabled in the public version of Google Drive, but Google employees test it.



It's likely that you'll be able to manage Gmail attachments from Google Drive, find attachments and share them with other people. Google Drive is already the central file repository for most Google services.

If you've ever wanted to buy 1TB of Google storage to upload all your documents, videos, photos and audio files to Google Drive and Google+ Photos, now it's cheaper to buy Google's Chromebook Pixel. When you pay $1300 for the ultrabook, Google also offers 1TB of storage for 3 years.

The regular price for 1TB of Google Drive storage is $50/month, so Google offers $1800 of storage for only $1300 and the hardware is "free". Obviously, there's a big difference between monthly payments and an upfront payment, not to mention that you may not need 1TB of storage right now and you can always upgrade later.


Google only offers 100GB of storage for 2 years when you buy any other current-generation Chromebook (Samsung Series 3, Samsung 550, Acer C7, HP Pavilion 14), so you only get $120 worth of storage. Chromebook Pixel users get 10 times more storage and an additional year for using it. And that's not the only "goody": "your Chromebook comes with 12 free [Gogo in-air internet] passes that you can use over 2 years on domestic US flights."

Google Drive has a new feature that lets you preview files using an interface borrowed from Google+. This feature is not restricted to photos and videos, it also works for Google Docs documents, presentations, spreadsheets, forms, drawings, Microsoft Office files, PDF, PostScript and XPS files and TrueType fonts.


It's interesting that Google Drive shows the new previews if you click a file that's not associated with a web application. For examples, the previews don't show up if you click a Google Docs document, so you need to right-click the file and select "Preview".


"When previewing a file, it's easy to flip through nearby files by clicking the arrows on the left and right sides of the preview window. This is a great way to scan through a group of photos you've stored in your Drive," explains Google. You can also use the left and right arrow keys to navigate to the other files and up/down arrow keys to scroll up/down in documents. While the previews don't let you edit documents, you can select text, zoom in or out, find text (Ctrl+F), print the documents or share them with other people.


The feature is currently rolled out, so you may not see it yet in your account. Check back later or sign in to a different Google account.

{ via Google Drive Blog }

Google has recently updated the "Create" menu from Google Drive and removed the templates option from the menu. You can still find it if you visit this page.

Another workaround is to create a document, spreadsheet, form, drawing or presentation, click the "File" menu, select "New" and then "From template".


Maybe Google finds a way to integrate the templates section with the Google Drive apps, so that it doesn't open in a new tab.

While Google Drive lets you upload any file, the support for files that can't be edited using Google Docs/Sheets/Slides is limited. For example, you can embed PDF files and videos, but Google doesn't offer permalinks for images.

So you've uploaded a photo to Google Drive and the only options are to download the file and link to the image page. But what if you want to embed that image in a web page or simply post a direct link to the image? You may think that right-clicking the image lets you copy the image URL, but that's not true. Even if you check the source code of a page or use features like Firefox's "view page info", you'll get a link that doesn't work.

Fortunately, there's an easy solution - replace this URL from the address bar:

http://docs.google.com/file/d/FILEID/edit

with:

http://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=FILEID

(where FILEID is a long sequence of digits and letters).

This only works if you've changed the visibility options to "public on the Web" or "anyone with the link" in the Share dialog.

Here's an example:


You can also use:

http://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=FILEID

to trigger a download and this works for any non-private Google Drive file, not just for images.

{ via Stack Overflow. Photo licensed as Creative Commons Attribution. }