The files in your Google Drive are either private (visible only to you) or visible to specific people you have chosen to share them with. Of course, there are other options, such as making your files available to everyone, or only to those who have the download link. In the case of folders, each file contained in a shared folder is visible to all users who have access to the folder.
But let's look at a slightly different scenario: you have a shared folder in Drive that you share with your friends and suddenly you want to share a file with only one of the users in the folder, without the others being able to see it.
A simple option is to move the file out of the folder. However, there is an alternative way that will help you easily hide files from Google Drive folders through camouflage without needing any additional scripts or extensions.
Let's see how:
Google Drive lets you store multiple versions of a file. If you upload a new version of a file, the previous version is also preserved. File versions can be of different types (with different extensions), so you can, for example, upload a PDF file first and then replace it with an image or video file.
The old PDF file will still be available in Google Drive, but it will be hidden. Here's a guide:
From drive.google.com, upload the file you want to hide from other users.
After uploading the file, right-click on it and select Manage Versions.
Select “Upload New Version” and upload another file, say an unrelated image.
Now rename the original file, for example, unrelated-image.jpg (you can give it any file name and extension you want).
Google Drive will automatically update the thumbnail of the file with the extension you gave and will show the one of the most recent version, i.e. the unrelated image you uploaded last (in our example I uploaded a Firefox compressed file and gave the image extension .tar.bz2). So even if someone double-clicks on the file to open it, they will see that it is an image preview (or in our example we are showing a compressed file).
Now you can choose the link you want to give your friend to download the hidden file.
Google Drive, by default, stores the previous version of any file for 30 days and then deletes it.
However, if you right-click on the file in Google Drive, it gives you a “Manage Versions” option, select the 3-dot vertical menu, and check Keep for Forever. This way, your hidden file will continue to be online.
