Team drives
Compress images in a shared drive, even without write access
A shared drive fills up faster than a personal one — more people, more uploads, nobody in particular responsible for it. Then you try to clean it up and discover the files are not really yours.
Why a shared drive behaves differently
In My Drive, you own what you upload. In a shared drive, the organisation owns everything — that is the feature. When someone leaves the company their files stay put instead of vanishing with their account.
Two consequences catch people out. The storage counts against the organisation’s pool, not anyone’s personal 15 GB, so freeing space there does nothing for your own quota. And your permission on any given file can be narrower than the folder suggests: plenty of people can open a shared drive and read every image in it without being allowed to change one.
Where most tools break
What usually happens
- The tool lists your files and starts a batch
- It compresses several successfully
- It hits a file you cannot write to
- The run stops, or fails file by file
Worse: some tools report shared drive files as not found rather than not allowed, because the Drive API answers that way when a request does not declare shared drive support.
What should happen
- Write access is checked before anything starts
- Files you can edit are handled normally
- Files you cannot are still compressed
- Those results are saved to your own Drive
You end up with every smaller image, and nothing in the shared drive changed without permission.
The permission question, answered plainly
You cannot replace a file you only have view access to. No tool can, and one that claims otherwise is doing something else. But nothing stops the image being read, compressed in your browser, and written somewhere you do control. That distinction is the difference between “this does not work for me” and a finished job.
PixelCinch checks capabilities.canEdit on every file before the run and switches the output location for you when the whole selection is read-only. It says so in the log rather than deciding quietly.
What to expect from the numbers
Shared marketing folders are usually the best case: full-resolution camera files and exported banners that nobody ever downsized. In a measured run, nine real files went from 96.2 MB to 2.2 MB — see how much images actually compress for the file-by-file breakdown, including what was lost.
Questions
Who owns the files in a shared drive?
The organisation does, not the person who uploaded them. That is the whole point of a shared drive: when someone leaves, their files stay. It also means the storage counts against the organisation’s pool rather than anyone’s personal 15 GB, and that your own permissions on a file can be narrower than you expect.
Can I compress images if I only have view access?
You cannot replace them — nothing can, that is what view access means. But the images can still be read, compressed, and the smaller copies saved to your own Drive. PixelCinch detects this before starting and switches the output location instead of failing partway through a run.
Why do some tools say a shared drive file does not exist?
Because of a Drive API detail: every request has to declare that it supports shared drives. If it does not, the API answers “not found” rather than “not allowed”. Tools that miss that flag report a missing file for something you are looking straight at.
Does compressing a shared drive image free up my personal storage?
No — it frees the organisation’s. Shared drive files never counted against your 15 GB in the first place. If your own storage is the problem, start with what is in My Drive.
Will other people see the compressed version?
Only if you write it back into the shared drive, which needs edit access. Saved to your own Drive, the copy is yours until you share it. Either way the original is untouched unless you explicitly choose to overwrite.
Related: compress images in Google Drive · what actually frees up Drive storage.