I have been wanting to use an online storage service for a while for extra redundancy of all my years of digital photos and videos which I already backup on RAID-1 mirrored drives at home.

All the available options that can support the amount of data I have (over 105 GB) have always been too expensive. I love Dropbox and how well integrated it is with Windows Explorer and that it's supported on Linux, but they too just charge too much.

Then I found out Google Drive was finally released to the public. Not only are their prices are fantastic at $9.99/month for 200 GB, but you can pay on a month-to-month instead of one payment per year. So, I signed up and started uploading all my data. (FYI, they also provide 5 GB for free if you're interested.)

While I was exploring the available features, I discovered one huge feature missing from Drive that Dropbox offers: In Dropbox if you want to share a file or, for example, display it in an <img> tag online, you simply right click the file and "copy public link." Simple.

Sharing in Drive is good because you can share any file or folder without it having to be in a special "Public" directory. Also, when you share, the file/folder can be accessed via a "fancy" (or bloated and unnecessary) file viewer interface instead of just having a link directly to the raw file on Google's servers. On top of that, the link they provide you is only valid for a short while before it stops working. Ugh.

I don't know if Google plans on ever changing all that, but I did a bit of investigating and discovered there are some programmatic ways around their lack of direct file sharing. So I went ahead and put a website together to allow you to paste the share URL for a public Google Drive file, and you will be returned a simple, short, and most importantly permanent URL that points directly at the raw file instead of it wrapped in Google's file viewer.

I'm guessing I won't find too many Google Drive users 'round these parts, but if you do happen to use it and would like to try out this simple little service, please give her a go. The website is gdURL.com (as in "Google Drive URL," not "goddamned URL" ).

Here's an example of a file hosted at Google Drive and permalinked through gdURL: