Google drive Space Saver

Automatically remind users to remove unused files to free up space in Google drive. Users can either keep, delete or backup their files in their google drive.

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Inspiration

Everyone today is so busy and they do not have time to go through every file that is on their google drive. The time comes up and their drive is full and they need to empty it. But the thought of spending all the time going through every single file is daunting. Why not have an app that randomly selects a file for you and helps you to do the job gradually with no pressure.

What it does

GDSS will run through your google Drive and randomly choose a file, preferably one of your old files, and present it to you. It will feel like you are seeing this one thing that you did not know you had, yet you had it and it takes up your space. All you have to do is to decide, whether to delete that file or to keep it, or to back it up.

Keep: For some important files, you simply just tell GDSS to keep. It will know that you need these files.

Delete: For some files that you do not need, GDSS will delete them permanently. GDSS won’t be able to delete shared files.

BackUp: A backup file is a file that GDSS will download and delete from your drive to save your space.

How we built it

We use Google Drive API python library to make quires to user's Google Drive, we also use OAuth 2.0 client ID to request user's consent to access their data. The graphical user interface is powered by Tkinter python library. This controls the buttons and the buttons control the functions that run in the back-end to fetch a random file preferably one year before, check if we have not seen it already and display it to the user and let the user decide whether to keep, delete, or backup.

Challenges we ran into

As every development process can be, Google drive API was new to both of us and we took some time trying to figure out how to run it. We originally wanted to have a google chrome extension so that it loads only when a person quickly glances into their google drive. This way a person only has to deal with one file every time they open their google drive. And gradually they will save their drive space. But because of time and because of the fact that we had used python, we were not able to totally dig into all the possible ways to make this possible. Nevertheless, Tkinter user interface does the job for us now.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we have finished our application in a limited time and are able to come up with a solution that may help most people who have storage problems on Google Drive. Even though we both don't have much prior experience working on API and app development, we are able to learn and develop at the same time and eventually finish with a prototype for our original idea.

What we learned

In terms of the technical aspect, we learn how to use Google Drive API and Tkinter to develop a new application. We also learned how to finish a project in a limited time.

What's next for Google drive Space Saver

Future Developments:

  1. Chrome Extension. We hope that we can make this a chrome and more so a general web browser extension to help people save their space on google drive. This will lead us to the next step. We would probably have to write our code in JavaScript instead of Python.
  2. Publishing the App on Google Cloud and Chrome Market Place.

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