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Why doesn't Google provide publicly accessible link to raw image files, which could be embedded in a website? As I've researched, they did allow it through G Suite a year ago, but not anymore, their reasoning being that there are other providers for this exact thing. As it stands now, it seems that the only possible way to achieve this is to first download the file via Google Drive API via your server and deliver it to the client. But this seems an overkill. What is your suggestion, should I switch to something else, e.g. Amazon S3, or is this solution scalable/economic enough? I picked Google Drive over Amazon S3 because it's free (at least to some extent).

user2340939
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  • Of the top of my head I would point out access control. GDrive and CDN/image hosting services have different purpose and requirements. Image hosting is designed to share images with unlimited and undeclared receiver. GDrive on the other hand is more about sharing it with known users and in this case requires more sophisticated mechanisms to control access. One of such mechanisms is invalidating access without actually removing image which is harder if someone has unconditional access to raw image bypassing rules and access management mechanics. Google just decided to specialize their mechanics – Perfect Square Dec 19 '17 at 00:09
  • Exactly, you elaborated a bit on the thing I mentioned. So it seems I can't expect to use Google Drive as an image hosting service? – user2340939 Dec 19 '17 at 00:13
  • No, it is unlikely. And if I were you I would not base any solution on this kind of Internet drive cause they will be going GDrive's way if not done it yet. Why don't you use image sharing sites? I assume that you are not afraid of publicly distributing these images to anyone. They will provide you with absolute link to image which could be used on your site. And there are plenty to choose from regardless if you want to pay for it or not. – Perfect Square Dec 19 '17 at 00:22
  • The problem is I got the impression from the forums that Google Drive can be used as an image sharing service. I will try Cloudinary, what do you think? – user2340939 Dec 19 '17 at 00:37
  • It seems Google discontinued this king of service last year ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10311092/displaying-files-e-g-images-stored-in-google-drive-on-a-website). You may be just hitting outdated information referring to previous state. When it comes to Cloudinary I am afraid I can't give you any advice about this service cause I have never used it. But if you want someone to point you to best service providers for your needs, you would have to write more about how you are going to use it eg. who will upload images, whether you need api to manage it, what would be volume growth etc. – Perfect Square Dec 19 '17 at 00:51
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    While Google Drive does not offer this functionality, Google Cloud Storage (https://cloud.google.com/storage) does. – Joshua Royalty Dec 19 '17 at 17:17

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