Access to all files on a user's Google Drive

10
votes

The api's for SkyDrive and Dropbox have options for managing the user's entire drive. For Google Drive, the drive.file scope seems to give only access to the files created by the app. Is there a scope for Google Drive that gives access to the entire drive?

1
google-drive-api

1 Answers

4
votes

Edit: The below answer was correct, but the latest version of the Drive API allows requesting of a full scope with https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive. The Documents List API is no longer needed for this use case. See https://developers.google.com/drive/scopes#requesting_full_drive_scope_for_an_app

To be precise the Drive API gives access to Files created by the app and files that the user has opened with the app from the Drive UI (through open-with).

To manipulate all of the Drive files of the user you can use the Google Document List API . Though we currently forbid Drive applications (the ones that have get integrated in the Drive UI through the Open-with and Create dialogs) to request access to the Document List API as we want to keep Drive application on a per-file security model. (Basically adding the Document List scope in the Drive SDK settings raises an error).