Quickly Crop, Resize Images on Google Drive - No Download Required

Google Drive is our easy option when it comes to sharing files — be it for personal or work team collaboration. And it’s easy to see why. Aside from the fact that it’s free, it got a plethora of apps you can use to even supercharge your workflow and save your time in the process.

One of those Google Drive apps that I stumbled upon is BeFunky Photo Editor. If you live in a country where internet is an issue (read: slow, expensive, and often capped internet), BeFunky Photo Editor will do you a favor.

Few days ago while finishing a customer’s website, a client shared a Google Driver folder containing a bunch of images to load up into his landing pages. The problem: the images came straight from a DSLR camera and were almost 30mb each. And we’re talking about 70-100 images.

Imagine the frustration I felt realising I had to download them all using my capped internet data so I can crop, resize them offline. I only needed at least 1200px wide versions of those images.

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Just as you can unzip files on Google Drive without downloading them, there has to have a way to also crop, resize images straight from Google Drive without downloading them for offline editing. So I ended up rummaging through Google Drive apps directory and discovered BeFunky Photo Editor.

Easily Crop, Resize Images on Google Drive without Downloading them

BeFunky Photo Editor is a top-rated photo editor on Google Workplace Marketplace with 4k+ users as of writing. It’s one decent, full-featured photo editor that works straight from your browser. Probably the biggest strength of this app is the simplified editing controls, making it easy to edit photos with a few click.

BeFunky is a uniquely powerful online and mobile photo editor. Think Photoshop, but simplified for everyday users. With BeFunky, you can easily create stunning, professional-quality images with a single click. The process might be simple, but the results are incredibly sophisticated. Thanks to BeFunky, there’s no need to choose between a powerful, do-it-all tool and an easy, user-friendly interface. We’ve got it all!

Here’s how to get started:

1. Navigate to your Google Drive folder

2. Right-click any image > Open with > Connect more apps. This will bring the Google Workplace Marketplace popup

   

3. Search for “BeFunky Photo Editor” and install

4. Once installed, follow the on-screen prompts to authenticate the app to manage your Google Drive files

Once done, you’re good to go. Just navigate back to your Google Drive folder and refresh. You should be able to right-click any image and open with BeFunky Photo Editor.

While BeFunky got all the image editing tools you’re familiar with from desktop apps like Photoshop, I specially like the crop/resize feature and support for Google Drive to quickly import, resize, and crop Google Drive images.

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And if you need fancier editing experience like text and graphics overlays for your ad banners perhaps or social media stuff, BeFunky got you covered. How cool is that?

Go check out BeFunky Photo Editor.

Get A List of All Google Drive Files & Folders in Google Sheet

Have you ever been in a situation where you wished you could get a simplified list of Google Drive files and folders in a Google Sheet?

If you’re working as a graphic designer or web developer, chances are you’ve probably gone through that occasion where you needed to juggle through multiples files and folders just to get the file you want.

Google Drive’s built-in file explorer isn’t that intuitive enough. Rummaging through hundreds of files can be too overwhelming, to say the least. Well right now, not anymore!

How To List All Google Drive Files & Folders in Google Sheet

Meet Drive Explorer, it’s a tiny little add-on for Google Sheet that lets you export all (or selected) files and folders into a much readable spreadsheet format.

Drive Explorer (formerly Drive Direct Links) lets you pick folders/files from your Google Drive, Shared Drive or the files shared with you to export to the Google Sheet. Sheet columns contain metadata of the files like name of the file, containing folder, folder path on your Google drive, direct download link, etc.

How Drive Explorer works:

1. You install the add-on and connect your Google account
2. Once connected, go to your Driver folder and create a spreadsheet
3. Inside your spreadsheet toolbar, click on Add-ons > Drive Explorer > Select files/folder.
4. And finally, wait for a few seconds until your spreadsheet is automatically refreshed containing your files/folders’ meta info such as folder names, filenames, folder paths, links, etc.

When is it useful?

Being able to view your Google Drive files and folders in a list helps us save time and improve team collaboration. If you own an online store and works with VAs to manage inventories, this add-on definitely comes in handy.

In our day job, for instance, we constantly update images on our client’s websites. And our clients usually just share a large Drive folder containing all the images that need to be uploaded to their website. With Drive Explorer, we can now easily get a decent list of files in that shared folder so our team can easily collaborate rather than going back and forth on Google Drive.

5 Handy Google Sheet Tricks To Help You Work Fast & Save Time

5 Handy Google Sheet Tricks To Help You Work Fast & Save Time

Just like Microsoft's Excel, Google Sheet has equally powerful functions hidden up its sleeve. It can help you do routinary, mundane tasks fast and perform time-saving complex operations.

With Google Sheet, being an open-source software and with its collaboration support, it's likely that you'll end up using the app more often than not. It's one indispensable tool every web master and virtual assistant can't live without.

While you may not use below's list of useful Google Sheet functions everyday, it pays to be familiar and well-verse with these shortcuts. We hand-picked this shortlist of five essential Google Sheets hacks to help you save time in dealing with spreadsheets.

1. Use SPLIT function and obtain the first word from a phrase

Suppose you want to extract the first word from a string in a Google Sheet column. You can use SPLIT() function to split a string and obtain first word , as follows:

=index(SPLIT(A2, " "), 0, 1)

With the above function, a string “10042 Ferrara” yields “10042”.

To obtain the n word, just replace 1 with n accordingly.

2. Use REGEXEXTRACT to retrieve number from a string

Suppose you have this data in a column and you wish to obtain the price

<p>Lined Linen Tunic with Silk Hem</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><strong>RRP    $99.95</strong></p>

You can do so with REGEXEXTRACT function to extract the price, as follows:

=REGEXEXTRACT(C2, "[0-9]*\.[0-9]+[0-9]+")

3. Using CONTACT to combine multiple values

Suppose in Column A you want to get the first word and combine it with the value in Column J, you can achieve it using CONCAT function.

=concat( index(SPLIT(A2, " "), 0, 1), concat("-", J2) )

Or use ampersand to combine multiple values:

="RRP "&value(REGEXEXTRACT(E12, "[0-9]*\.[0-9]+[0-9]+"))

4. Use SUBSTITUTE() & RegexReplace() to search and replace

Say you have a column of data that contains HTML ASCII codes and you want to get rid of them. Here's how you do it:

=SUBSTITUTE(B2," ", "")

Or you can go creative, do a nested SUBSTITUTE

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B2, "</p>", ""),"<p>", "")

Or you can go use RegExReplace to get rid all HTML tags

=RegexReplace( B2, "<\/\w+>|<\w+.*?>", "" )

Or a combination of Substitute and RegexReplace

=SUBSTITUTE(RegexReplace( B3, "<\/\w+>|<\w+.*?>", "" ),"&nbsp;", " " )

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5. Use VLOOKUP to search by keyword and return a specified cell from another sheet

Google Sheet's vertical lookup is a powerful function you need to master. It lets you search down the first column of a range for a key and returns the value of a specified cell in the row found.

If that doesn't make sense, imagine you have Sheet14 containing sku and color columns

Sheet14

And wanted to append the color initial found inside a separate table from Sheet15

Sheet15

You can do a quick search using VLOOKUP and return the color initial (from Sheet15) by providing color from Sheet14.

The full formula:

=VLOOKUP(I2, Sheet15!A1:B7,2, false)

Where I2 is the keyword, Sheet15!A1:B7 is the range, and 2 is column position from Sheet15 we want to retrieve.

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So next time you are asked to update a Google Sheet and do dead boring, repetitive tasks, try to look around inside Google Sheet list of functions and see if you can automate stuff and save huge amount of time in the process.