Help to download content in a shared folder on Google Drive using Rclone GUI

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

I want to download content that is in a 'Shared with me' folder in Google Drive but there is no icon allowing me to carry this out in the GUI. I can see the download icon for files/folders that are in my Google Drive, but the download icon is not showing for the shared folder. Is there something I need to do to configure the ability to download shared folders or is it just something that is not possible using Rclone? I have set up the config to access my Google Drive, and can see the folder I wish to download in the 'Explorer' area. In Google Drive I have added a shortcut to the shared folder to my Google Drive, but it is not possible to copy or move the shared folder to my Google Drive in the web interface.

I am very new to command line and all of this, so please excuse my lack of knowledge. I would rather use the GUI than the command line, but if there is no other way than the command line, could you give step-by-step instructions? I've tried to read as much of the documentation as possible, but couldn't find anything specifically to address my issue. I realise the GUI is still being developed, so there is not as much about this yet. Any help is much appreciated.

For further context, I am a digital archivist trying to reliably download files and folders from Google Drive that donors have shared with me - if you know of a good way of doing this, please let me know! The content often includes large video files that are difficult to simply download directly from the web interface due to file download limits. I've tried direct downloads, using the Google Drive desktop application and Google Takeout, but these are all hard to verify and I would like to be able to have checksum verification for all downloads.

Run the command 'rclone version' and share the full output of the command.

rclone v1.67.0

  • os/version: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 22H2 (64 bit)
  • os/kernel: 10.0.19045.4651 (x86_64)
  • os/type: windows
  • os/arch: amd64
  • go/version: go1.22.4
  • go/linking: static
  • go/tags: cmount

Which cloud storage system are you using? (eg Google Drive)

Google Drive

The command you were trying to run (eg rclone copy /tmp remote:tmp)

I was running the Rclone GUI, using the 'Explorer' section of the interface.
rclone rcd --rc-web-gui

Please run 'rclone config redacted' and share the full output. If you get command not found, please make sure to update rclone.

type = drive
token = XXX
client_id = XXX
client_secret = XXX
team_drive =

welcome to the forum,

could edit the config file, which is a simple text file.

  1. find the config file using rclone config file
  2. add shared_with_me = true to the remote, so it would look something like this
type = drive
token = XXX
client_id = XXX
client_secret = XXX
team_drive =
shared_with_me = true

note: the rclone gui has been updated in several years.

i think you will want to learn about rclone mount and then can use windows explorer to transfer files.

I ended up helping out and we figured out how to use the sync command. For posterity, here's what we ended up using, and this worked perfectly. This depended on having the Google OAUTH already in a working state, which @darchivist1 had done exactly right.

rclone sync --checksum --verbose --progress --log-file G:\SharedFolderSync.log MyGoogleDrive:"Shared Folder" G:\SharedFolder

That's actually not right as if the OP really meant shared with me, you can't see any shared folders unless you use the shared-with-me flag as the folder name itself would result in folder not found.

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