How To Upload Files To Google Drive From Android – Tech Time With Timmy

One of the best benefits of Google Drive is that you can upload files from any different device and store them all in one place.

And I show you how to upload files to Google Drive from a computer here, but if you want to upload files to Google Drive from your Android phone or tablet, I’m going to show you how to do that in this article.

Prefer to watch a video about how to upload files to Google Drive from Android? Click here.

How To Upload A File To Google Drive From Android

To upload a file to Google Drive from your Android phone or tablet, all you need to do is open up the Google Drive app and tap on the plus icon in the bottom right hand corner.

And then, in the menu that appears, tap on the “Upload” button.

Now, this next part might look a little bit different depending on which brand of phone you’re using (I’m using a Google Pixel), but the general idea will still be the same.

It will open up the files of your phone or tablet, and you’ll need to select the file you want to upload. On my phone, it happens to have opened the downloads folder, so if the file I wanted to upload to Google Drive was in the downloads folder, I could just select it here.

But if you want to upload a different file that’s in a different folder on your phone, you would just need to tap on the menu button in the top left hand corner of the screen…

And then, in the menu that appears, tap on the location where you’ll find the file. If you tap on something like “Recent” or “Images”, you’ll find all your recent files or all your images, so that might be the easiest way to find the file you want to upload.

Or, if you tap on the name of your phone…

You’ll see all the different folders on your phone and be able to look through each one of them.

This can be good if you know exactly where a specific file is, but all the folders on an Android device can get quite messy so I would probably recommend just looking for your file in one of the main categories like “Recent”, “Images”, “Downloads”, etc if you can.

For the purpose of this demonstration, I’m just going to upload a picture I recently took on my phone, so to do that, I’m going to tap on “Images”…

Then tap on the “Camera” folder to view all the images I took with my phone’s camera…

And then tap on the image I want to upload.

Depending on your phone, once you tap on the file you want to upload, it might immediately start uploading it to Google Drive. Or, it might just select the file, and in that case, you’ll need to tap on a button somewhere that says “Open”, “Select”, “Upload”, or something else like that, and then it will begin uploading

But regardless of whether or not you needed to do that extra step, if your phone is currently connected to wifi, it should begin uploading the file to Google Drive. And you should have a notification from Google Drive showing you the upload progress.

But, if your phone is using a cellular network like 3G, 4G, or 5G, the upload will likely be paused until you connect to wifi to try and conserve mobile data. And if that’s the case, you’ll get a notification letting you know the upload is paused.

If you don’t want to use excess mobile data and you’re happy to wait until the next time you have a wifi connection, you can just leave it like this and the file will upload as soon as you’re connected to wifi.

But if (like me) you don’t mind using extra mobile data and you just want to upload the file straight away, you can tap the “Resume” button on the notification and the file will begin uploading immediately.

But regardless of what network you’re connected to, once the file is finished uploading, you’ll get a notification letting you know it’s been uploaded.

And that’s all there is to it! Your file is now uploaded to Google Drive! You can now dismiss that notification, and if you tap on the “Files” icon in the bottom right hand corner of the screen to see all the files in your Google Drive…

You’ll find your newly uploaded file somewhere in there! It might not be at the top of the screen, so you might need to scroll down a bit to find it, but it will be in there somewhere.

So that’s great, but obviously, if you have a lot of files to upload, it could take quite a while to upload them one by one. Fortunately, there is actually a fairly easy way that you can upload multiple files to Google Drive at once.

How To Upload Multiple Files To Google Drive From Android

To upload multiple files to Google Drive from your Android device, you’ll just need to tap on the plus icon in the Google Drive app…

And then, in the menu that appears, tap on the “Upload” button just like you would to upload a single file.

But now, instead of tapping on the file you want to upload, hold down on one of the files you want to upload until your phone buzzes and the file becomes highlighted.

And then, simply tap on all the other files you want to upload to select them all.

Once you’ve selected all the files you want to upload, you’ll need to find a button to tap on to begin uploading all the files.

The button might be different and might even be in a different location depending on what phone you’re using, but it should say something like “Select”, “Continue”, “Upload”, “Open”, or something else like that. And it will probably be in the corner of the screen somewhere.

Once you’ve tapped on that button (whatever it looked like), assuming you’re connected to wifi, all the files you selected should now begin uploading to Google Drive, and you’ll get a notification showing the upload progress.

But, if you’re using cellular data like 3G, 4G, or 5G, the upload will most likely be paused until you connect to wifi and you’ll get a notification telling you so just like when you upload an individual file.

If you’ve selected a lot of large files, you might actually want to wait until you’re connected to wifi because uploading them could end up using quite a bit of mobile data.

But if you’re only uploading a few small files, or you don’t mind using large amounts of mobile data, you can simply tap the “Resume” button on the notification and the upload will start immediately.

Once all the files you selected have been uploaded, you’ll get a notification letting you know the upload is complete.

And you’re done! All the files you selected are now on Google Drive! So you can now dismiss the notification, and if you tap on files to view all the files in your Google Drive, you’ll see them all somewhere there!

And that’s all there is to it! Whether you wanted to upload just one file or lots of files to Google Drive from your Android device, you now know how it’s done.