The final improvement to Google Drive is Windows and macOS compatibility. Past versions required that you mirror media files before using them.
Interestingly, Google’s Drive for Desktop now offers the ability to stream files from the cloud. (In the past, uploaded photos sat in Drive like any other files.) Of course, this comes just as Google is ending unlimited storage for its Photos service. You can choose select files or folders to automatically sync with Drive, and now, all photos backed up through Drive for Desktop will automatically go into your Google Photos account.
Version 49 of Drive for Desktop supports up to four accounts, which you can jump between by clicking your profile picture in the Drive for Desktop app.īut Drive for Desktop also sees some improvements in its basic functionality (that is, backing up and syncing files). In past versions of Drive for Desktop, users had to manually log in and out of each account they wanted to access. The most notable improvement may be multi-account support. Google plans to merge these apps into a unified Drive for Desktop by the end of the year, and to kick things off, it’s rolling out a major update that greatly improves the desktop app’s usability and speed. There’s the consumer-level Backup and Sync, and of course, the enterprise-grade Drive for Desktop (formerly Drive File Stream). For whatever reason, Google Drive has two different desktop apps.
