Turn a Google Drive Full of Photos Into One Searchable Sheet

To search a Google Drive full of photos and videos, you need something that tells you what is in each file, because the file names will not. Slate does this by cataloguing a library into one Google Sheet: a link to every file, its date, a plain description, a duplicate flag and a column where you mark what to keep. Slate is still in development, so this post is about what I am building and why, not a finished product you can buy today.

The problem with IMG_1234

Cameras and phones name files with a counter. After a few years, a shared Drive holds tens of thousands of photos and videos called IMG_1234, MOV_0098 and so on. The folder names help a little. They tell you the event, perhaps. They do not tell you which of 400 photos shows the stage, the group by the entrance, or the cake.

So when someone asks for "the best photos from last spring’s event," the answer is an afternoon of scrolling. Often it is a different afternoon for each person who asks. Duplicates make it worse: the same shot saved three times, in three folders.

What the sheet contains

Slate walks through a library and gives back one row for every photo and video. A row has:

• A link that opens the original file in Drive
• A date for when the picture belongs to
• A description, written in plain words, of what the picture or clip shows
• A duplicate flag, so repeats are easy to spot
• A "Keep?" column, empty, for you to fill in

Photos and videos share one sheet, with a Type column to tell them apart. That means you can use the tools you already know. Search for "cake" with Ctrl+F. Filter by date. Sort. Share the sheet with a colleague who has never opened the Drive.

The "Keep?" column

I added this after talking to the person the first library belonged to. They did not want a tool that decided for them. They wanted a sheet they could mark up themselves. So the column is free text. You write what you want in it. It is not a dropdown, which has a trade-off: filtering by an exact value is less tidy than it would be with fixed choices. I chose flexibility over neatness.

Read-only on Drive

The worry I hear first is about the originals, and it is the right worry. Slate is read-only on Drive. It never renames, moves or deletes a file. The only thing it writes is the Google Sheet. Slate began as a tool that renamed files in place, and I dropped that idea because a shared library cannot safely be renamed, and because the person who owned the library wanted a sheet to work from, not a changed Drive.

A long run can also be stopped and started again without redoing work, because each pass remembers where it got to. A big library takes hours, and a laptop lid closing should not cost you the lot.

One honest note on the AI

To describe a picture, Slate uses Google’s Gemini, a vision model. That means the content of your photos is processed by Google’s service as part of the run. If a library is sensitive, think about that before you start. I would rather you hear it from me now than find it in the small print.

“The point of a catalogue is not to change your files. It is to let you find them without opening each one.”

Where Slate stands, and who it is for

Slate is in development. It is a Mac app that I am building and testing on a real client library, and it is not released for general use. I am not going to tell you otherwise.

It is for people who look after a large photo and video library on Google Drive and cannot find anything in it: an events business, an agency holding client media, a team with years of shared uploads. If that is you, ask me about it on the free call, or read the Slate page, and I will tell you where it stands and whether it would suit your library.