Do you use Google Docs or any of Google’s other office apps (Sheets, Slides, etc.)? They’re great for collaboration, as I shared in Cloud Storage. If so, you likely have found yourself on Google Drive, faced with a possibly confusing hodgepodge of interface elements. There are documents, folders, and computers (oh my!), plus shared, starred, and more.

You might be further confused by the way Google has implemented creating folders and organizing items in them, including the tiniest disclosure triangles. This whole arrangement may be frustratingly unfamiliar and inflexible compared to the Finder, where you’re used to organizing your stuff.

Thus, you might be pleased to know that Google offers a desktop app that integrates Google Drive into the Finder. This enables you to organize items with ease and among all the files and folders you already have on your Mac.

Install Google Drive

You can easily install Google Drive on your Mac. Download it from Google, open the disk image, and install the contained package.

When you open Google Drive for the first time, click Get Started and sign into your Google account. (Do you use Google Drive with more than one account? You can add multiple accounts in the app.)

Google Drive will then invite you to sync common folders from your Mac, like Desktop and Documents, as well as photos and videos. I recommend skipping all of these.

After all, if you benefit from having a copy in a cloud and syncing with other devices, you likely already use iCloud for this purpose, and it would be unnecessarily duplicative — and potentially costly — to keep an extra copy on Google’s servers.

After you complete the initial setup, click the Google Drive icon on the menubar, click the gear, and choose Preferences. Select Google Drive on the sidebar. Here, you get to choose whether you primarily want to download your files on-demand or keep them continuously mirrored on your computer.

If you have capacity on your Mac for the entire contents of your Google Drive storage, I recommend the latter. This ensures you can also locally back up all of your stuff (except for items in Google’s proprietary document formats) and not have to rely exclusively on Google in case your files get lost.

Organize in the Finder

You’re old hat to Finder navigation, right? Google puts your Google Drive content in your Home folder and at the top of Favorites in the sidebar. It’s easy to drag files into folders, create folders that contain selected items, etc., just like usual.

Shared With Me MIA

One thing missing from Google Drive on the Mac is its Shared With Me section, where items shared by others appear. These files and folders only show up in My Drive if you drag them there.

So, take some time on the Google Drive website to put items from Shared With Me in My Drive or specific folders therein. (Click the tiny disclosure triangle next to My Drive to reveal the folders it contains.) After your changes sync down to your Mac, you can continue your organization process in the Finder.

If you’re having trouble understanding why you would use Google Drive in the first place, let’s chat. You might not need it at all. Or you might not need the level of organization I’m suggesting.

However, there’s a lot of power embedded in organizing files and remembering where you’re storing them so you can find them again. I find relying exclusively on search capabilities, as Google tends to encourage, is not as efficient as this alternative.