Find files on Google Drive

This is the closest googledrive function to what you can do at https://drive.google.com: by default, you just get a listing of your files. You can also search in various ways, e.g., filter by file type or ownership or work with shared drives. This is a very powerful function. Together with the more specific drive_get(), this is the main way to identify files to target for downstream work. If you know you want to search within a specific folder or shared drive, use drive_ls().

drive_find(
  pattern = NULL,
  trashed = FALSE,
  type = NULL,
  n_max = Inf,
  shared_drive = NULL,
  corpus = NULL,
  ...,
  verbose = deprecated(),
  team_drive = deprecated()
)

Arguments

pattern: Character. If provided, only the items whose names match this regular expression are returned. This is implemented locally on the results returned by the API.
trashed: Logical. Whether to search files that are not in the trash (trashed = FALSE, the default), only files that are in the trash (trashed = TRUE), or to search regardless of trashed status (trashed = NA).
type: Character. If provided, only files of this type will be returned. Can be anything that drive_mime_type() knows how to handle. This is processed by googledrive and sent as a query parameter.
n_max: Integer. An upper bound on the number of items to return. This applies to the results requested from the API, which may be further filtered locally, via the pattern argument.
shared_drive: Anything that identifies one specific shared drive: its name, its id or URL marked with as_id(), or a dribble. The value provided to shared_drive is pre-processed with as_shared_drive(). Read more about shared drives.
corpus: Character, specifying which collections of items to search. Relevant to those who work with shared drives and/or Google Workspace domains. If specified, must be one of "user", "drive" (requires that shared_drive also be specified), "allDrives", or "domain". Read more about shared drives.
...: Other parameters to pass along in the request. The most likely candidate is q. See below and the API's Search for files and folders guide.
verbose: This logical argument to individual googledrive functions is deprecated. To globally suppress googledrive messaging, use options(googledrive_quiet = TRUE) (the default behaviour is to emit informational messages). To suppress messaging in a more limited way, use the helpers local_drive_quiet() or with_drive_quiet().
team_drive: Google Drive and the Drive API have replaced Team Drives with shared drives.

Value

An object of class dribble, a tibble with one row per file.

File type

The type argument is pre-processed with drive_mime_type(), so you can use a few shortcuts and file extensions, in addition to full-blown MIME types. googledrive forms a search clause to pass to q.

Search parameters

Do advanced search on file properties by providing search clauses to the q parameter that is passed to the API via .... Multiple q clauses or vector-valued q are combined via 'and'.

Trash

By default, drive_find() sets trashed = FALSE and does not include files in the trash. Literally, it adds q = "trashed = false" to the query. To search only the trash, set trashed = TRUE. To see files regardless of trash status, set trashed = NA, which adds q = "(trashed = true or trashed = false)" to the query.

Sort order

By default, drive_find() sends orderBy = "recency desc", so the top files in your result have high "recency" (whatever that means). To suppress sending orderBy at all, do drive_find(orderBy = NULL). The orderBy parameter accepts sort keys in addition to recency, which are documented in the files.list endpoint. googledrive translates a snake_case specification of order_by into the lowerCamel form, orderBy.

Shared drives and domains

If you work with shared drives and/or Google Workspace, you can apply your search query to collections of items beyond those associated with "My Drive". Use the shared_drive or corpus arguments to control this. Read more about shared drives.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# list "My Drive" w/o regard for folder hierarchy
drive_find()

# filter for folders, the easy way and the hard way
drive_find(type = "folder")
drive_find(q = "mimeType = 'application/vnd.google-apps.folder'")

# filter for Google Sheets, the easy way and the hard way
drive_find(type = "spreadsheet")
drive_find(q = "mimeType='application/vnd.google-apps.spreadsheet'")

# files whose names match a regex
# the local, general, sometimes-slow-to-execute version
drive_find(pattern = "ick")
# the server-side, executes-faster version
# NOTE: works only for a pattern at the beginning of file name
drive_find(q = "name contains 'chick'")

# search for files located directly in your root folder
drive_find(q = "'root' in parents")
# FYI: this is equivalent to
drive_ls("~/")

# control page size or cap the number of files returned
drive_find(pageSize = 50)
# all params passed through `...` can be camelCase or snake_case
drive_find(page_size = 50)
drive_find(n_max = 58)
drive_find(page_size = 5, n_max = 15)

# various ways to specify q search clauses
# multiple q's
drive_find(
  q = "name contains 'TEST'",
  q = "modifiedTime > '2020-07-21T12:00:00'"
)
# vector q
drive_find(q = c("starred = true", "visibility = 'anyoneWithLink'"))

# default `trashed = FALSE` excludes files in the trash
# `trashed = TRUE` consults ONLY file in the trash
drive_find(trashed = TRUE)
# `trashed = NA` disregards trash status completely
drive_find(trashed = NA)

# suppress the default sorting on recency
drive_find(order_by = NULL, n_max = 5)

# sort on various keys
drive_find(order_by = "modifiedByMeTime", n_max = 5)
# request descending order
drive_find(order_by = "quotaBytesUsed desc", n_max = 5)
} # }