Google Drive Previewer

At first I thought Google Drive was just a tool, useful as a Word Document replacement. Then we started using it for clients. Organization and communication were more seamless and we all were literally “on the same page”. Today I discovered something I hadn’t noticed. I loaded an AI file in through Google Drive on my computer and clicked on it in Drive. It loaded. Not only did it load without loss, but the artboards were also included. This was an Adobe Illustrator CC-created document. It is something that could revolutionize file sharing as clients could easily see Illustrator files where previously you would need to export as a JPG for preview. Apparently this feature has been available since 2011. Here are more file types you can preview:

  • Image files (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF, .TIFF, .BMP)
  • Video files (WebM, .MPEG4, .3GPP, .MOV, .AVI, .MPEGPS, .WMV, .FLV)
  • Text files (.TXT)
  • Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML, .PHP, .C, .CPP, .H, .HPP, .JS)
  • Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX)
  • Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
  • Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)
  • Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF)
  • Apple Pages (.PAGES)
  • Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
  • Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
  • Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF)
  • Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
  • Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
  • PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
  • TrueType (.TTF)
  • XML Paper Specification (.XPS)
  • Archive file types (.ZIP and .RAR)
  • .MTS files

Another cool thing I discovered was you can save the images from the artboards (individual artboards) directly from the previewer, or link them to share. Anything outside of the AI artboards was not visible from the previewer.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments