ChannelEngine: publish product media via Google Drive

About this article

This article describes how to make your product media accessible via the file storage and synchronization service Google Drive so that your media is available on ChannelEngine and your channels.

Table of contents

Introduction

How to publish product media via Google Drive

Introduction

To load your product media via URL to ChannelEngine or directly to a channel, you need to store your media in a publicly accessible location. One method for creating public-access URLs for your media is by storing the media on Google Drive. 

How to publish product media via Google Drive

To publish your product media via Google Drive, follow the steps described below:

1. Upload all required media to a dedicated folder on Google Drive.
2. Right-click the folder and click Share. Under Get link, click Change and select the option Anybody with the link.
3. Change the format of each media's URL, replacing file/d/ with uc?id=.
4. Remove the suffix /view?usp=sharing from the media's URL.
5. Check the media's URL to see if it generates a direct link, which does not prompt you to log into Google Drive. To do so, open the URL using an incognito window of your browser. If you use Google Chrome, click the three-dot menu at the top-right corner of the browser and click New incognito window.

6. If you have a large number of media files to publish, copy and paste all media URLs to a spreadsheet and use the Find and replace feature to: replace all instances of file/d/ with uc?id=; and replace all instances of /view?usp=sharing with a blank space.

   NB: if you are working on Shopify (channel), remove the blank spaces at the end of the URL to avoid issues with the image upload.

E.g.:

Original URL - https://drive.google.com/file/d/17WYOd3MaHbEiTxU_IubJ-v21JgbHdCLm/view?usp=sharing

Updated URL - https://drive.google.com/uc?id=17WYOd3MaHbEiTxU_IubJ-v21JgbHdCLm