How to Send a Large File With Google Drive: Limits & Sharing

Upload the file to Google Drive, right-click it, choose Share, then Get link, and set it to "Anyone with the link" so the recipient doesn't need a Google account to open it. Copy that link and send it however you'd normally reach them. That's the whole process, and it takes under a minute for a file already on your computer.

What trips people up isn't the upload. It's everything downstream of it: Drive's actual storage ceiling, a recipient stuck on a permissions screen instead of the file, and the fact that once the file lands, Drive has nothing built in for someone to actually review it. All three, below.

How to send a large file with Google Drive

• Upload the file. Drag it into drive.google.com, or use the desktop app if it's already synced to a local folder.
• Right-click the file and select Share.
• Change access from "Restricted" to "Anyone with the link." This is the step people skip, and it's the reason most "the link doesn't work" problems happen — covered in full below.
• Set the permission level — Viewer, Commenter, or Editor, depending on whether the recipient needs to do anything besides look at it.
• Copy the link and send it. Paste it into an email, a message, wherever the recipient will actually see it.

If the file is already too large for Gmail to attach directly, Gmail does this step for you automatically: attach anything over 25MB and Gmail swaps it for a Drive link on its own, no manual upload required.

Google Drive's real storage and file size limits

Every Google account gets 15GB of free storage, and it's shared across Gmail, Drive, and Google Photos — not 15GB for Drive alone, per Google's own storage documentation. A handful of large video exports can eat that allowance before Gmail and Photos even get a turn. A file-transfer service like Affily isn't tied to Gmail storage and sidesteps that ceiling entirely.

The maximum size for a single file is 5TB, and there's a separate cap most people never hit: 750GB total across all uploads in a rolling 24-hour period, per Google's developer documentation on Drive usage limits. Upload one file that's bigger than that daily cap and it still goes through — it's every file after it that gets blocked until the next day.

In practice, storage runs out long before either of those ceilings matters. A free account fills up on video work fast, and the fix is either buying a Google One plan for more space or clearing out what's already there — neither of which helps if the file needs to go out today.

If you're hitting that 15GB wall regularly, or the file's headed to someone who needs to review it rather than just download it, a tool built specifically for large transfers is usually simpler than working around Drive's caps. Affily, for one, sends files through a single shareable link with no separate storage account to manage — the free plan covers 10GB of transfers a month with no credit card required, and the recipient opens a preview directly, without a Google account or a permissions screen standing between them and the file.

Setting sharing permissions so people can actually open it

"Request access" is the single most common reason a Drive link doesn't work, and it has nothing to do with the file itself. It means the link is still set to "Restricted," which only lets people already granted individual access open it — everyone else, including someone you meant to share it with, hits a request screen and has to wait for approval, per Google's own sharing documentation.

Anyone who's shared a project folder for more than a week has fielded the same question twice: which folder am I supposed to upload the file to again? Drive doesn't solve that on its own — it just gives everyone a deeper set of nested folders to lose the answer in.

• "Anyone with the link" — the setting that actually avoids the request screen. No Google account required to view, just the link.
• "Restricted" — only people individually added can open it. Safer for sensitive files, but every new recipient means going back in and adding them by email first.
• Viewer, Commenter, Editor — control what they can do once they're in, separate from whether they can get in at all.

Picture a freelance editor sending a rough cut to a client through a shared Drive folder still set to "Restricted" from a previous project. The client clicks the link, lands on a request-access screen, and replies asking for the file over WhatsApp instead. Twenty minutes pass before anyone's actually looked at the video — not because the file was hard to send, but because a permission setting from an unrelated job never got reset.

Password protection and other ways to restrict access

Google Drive has no native password lock on an individual file or folder the way some file-transfer services do. Access is controlled entirely through the sharing settings above — "Restricted" plus specific people, or "Anyone with the link" plus a permission level. If a file genuinely needs a password on top of that, it has to be added another way: password-protecting the file itself before uploading (a zip archive with a password, for instance), since Drive's own sharing controls don't offer it.

• Keep sensitive files on "Restricted" and add people individually rather than defaulting to "Anyone with the link" out of convenience.
• Set an expiration date on the share, available for paid Google Workspace accounts, so access doesn't quietly outlive the project it was for.
• Check who already has access periodically. A link shared six months ago for one job doesn't automatically get revoked when that job ends.

When a Drive link isn't the right call

A Drive link is the right tool for exactly one job: getting a file from your account to someone else's screen. It has nothing to say about what happens after that — whether the recipient actually opened it, what they thought, or which version is current once a second draft replaces the first. For a one-off send to someone who just needs to download and go, that's not a problem. It becomes one the moment the file is part of a longer back-and-forth.

• The file needs a decision, not just delivery. A client watching a cut, a stakeholder signing off on a design — Drive has no built-in way to record that anyone actually approved it.
• Feedback needs to point at something specific. "Around the middle, the part with the drone shot" costs a rewatch before anyone agrees which second is meant. Drive comments work on Docs and Sheets; they don't pin to a timestamp in a video or a spot on an image.
• More than one person needs to weigh in. Once feedback starts arriving by email, Slack, and a comment on the Drive file itself, someone has to manually reconcile all three before the next revision goes out.

Sending a file that needs review, not just a download

Files without context become chaos fast. A Drive folder full of near-identical exports — final, final_v2, final_v2_reviewed — means nothing without knowing which one a client actually saw, and which round of notes it answers. Storage was never really the hard part of sending a file. The context around it is, and Drive's folder structure doesn't track that on its own.

The traditional path looks like this: upload to Drive, send the link, recipient downloads it, feedback comes back by email describing a moment in the file, someone re-uploads a revision with no structural tie to the note it addressed. Affily shortens that into: upload, send, the recipient previews it in the browser and leaves a comment pinned to the exact timestamp or spot on the image, and the next revision stays attached to the comment it was answering.

On pricing: Affily's free plan needs no credit card and covers 10GB of transfers a month. Starter runs $8/month billed yearly and adds timestamped video comments, pinned image feedback, and password-protected links — the password protection Drive's own sharing settings don't offer at any price. Every paid plan includes a 7-day free trial, and links on Free and Starter expire after 3 days, a reasonable default for a one-off send; Pro and Creator Teams remove that expiry for a file you'll need to reference again next month.

None of this makes Google Drive the wrong choice for what it's actually built for — a permanent, organized library of files you and your team come back to. It just isn't built for the send-review-revise loop, and that gap is worth knowing about before a client's feedback ends up scattered across three apps instead of attached to the file. For the video-specific version of this same problem, see our guide to sending large video files; for a straight comparison of the two most common transfer tools, see WeTransfer vs Dropbox; and for what good review software should actually do once a file needs sign-off, see online proofing software.