Quickly rename files in Google Drive with Apps Script and Google Gemini AI. The script will automatically rename the files with a descriptive name based on the image content.
Amit Agarwal is celebrating 20 years of ‘Digital Inspiration’, one of my go to resources for Google Workspace tech tips, tutorials and how-to guides. This recent post from Amit is a great example of the types of solutions he regularly shares. This time Amit is looking at how the Generative AI capabilities of the Gemini API can be used to help rename images in Google Drive. To achieve this there Amit shares handy Apps Script snippets for finding images in a Google Drive folder, grabbing the thumbnail images as Base64 encoded strings before calling the Gemini Pro Vision API to get suggested filenames with the prompt:
Analyze the image content and propose a concise, descriptive filename in 5-15 words without providing any explanation or additional text. Use spaces instead of underscores.
For this solution an API key for Gemini Pro Vision is generated in Google AI Studio (formerly MakerSuite). There are still geographic restrictions on access to Google AI Studio, but given Apps Script runs on Google servers once you have a API key you can continue to use it without having to proxy a location.
Image credit: Amit Agarwal
Adding image capabilities to the GeminiApp Apps Script library has been on my TODO. Now I’ve got an example to play with it should be easier to do .. thank you Amit Agarwal.
Imagine this: you recall a document about an intriguing subject but can’t pin down a specific term. It’s a common scenario where traditional search methods in Gmail or Google Docs often fall short, relying heavily on exact terms. Enter the realm of ‘semantic’ search, powered by advanced language models. ‘Semantic’ isn’t just a fancy word; it’s about understanding the meaning and context behind your words. Instead of a frustrating keyword hunt, these models interpret your descriptions, no matter how vague, to find that needle in the digital haystack.
“Code is Poetry” is the tagline popularised by the open-source blogging platform WordPress. In this post from Riël Notermans at Zzapps.nl ‘code is FOR poetry’. It’s well worth spending the time unpick what is happening in this tutorial. To help understand the implications I would also recommend watching this short video on the Google Workspace Developers channel where Riël explains how the technique can be used for other applications like knowledge bases.
Even if you are not interested in generating poetry it’s an opportunity to see how the Vertex AI Generative Language API can be used in Google Workspace, in this instance to generate text for a Google Doc using a corpus of data from your Google Drive. Follow the source link for the code and setup instructions.
Gemini LLM, now a Vertex AI/Studio API, unlocks easy document summarization and image analysis via Google Apps Script. This report details an example script for automatically creating the description of the files on Google Drive and highlights seamless integration options with API keys.
In this blog post, Kanshi Tanaike shows how you can automatically create descriptions for files on Google Drive using the Gemini Pro API with Google Apps Script. The post includes a step-by-step guide on how to set up and use the Gemini Pro API by generating a key is Google AI Studio (formerly Maker Suite). There are geographic restrictions on Google AI Studio, but you can call Gemini Pro from a Google Cloud project with a little more setup (a previous post sharing Tutorial: Respond to incidents with Google Chat, Vertex AI, and Apps Script outlines a general approach for connecting Apps Script to Google Vertex AI services.)
The post includes a couple of examples showing how Gemini can be used to provide responses to both text and visual prompts. Gemini Pro is still in public preview and as Kanshi Tanaike highlights rate limiting will likely prevent putting these solutions into production just now. At this point hopefully there is enough to start experimenting with Google Workspace integrations to Gemini.
Creating dynamic charts in the sidebar of your Google Workspace Add-on can be an effective approach to getting across a lot of meaning in a somewhat confined space. In this tutorial, we will use Google’s Chart API to generate a live chart, first from some static data and then live from an external data source like a Google Sheet. All with the help of a little Google Apps Script magic.
Here’s another great tutorial from Scott Donald which provides a detailed tutorial for including charts in a Google Workspace Add-on using the Card Service. The tutorial covers how you can embed dynamic chart data from a Google Sheet. Whilst targeted at Google Workspace Add-ons (Gmail and Drive) you should be able to easily modify this for cards used in Google Chat. The source tutorial includes a video giving an overview of the solution and if you want to take this project further you can signup for Scott’s Create and Publish Google Workspace Add-ons with Google Apps Script: Master Class.
The v3 of the Google Drive API has actually been around for a number of years launched on December 14, 2015. One of the reasons Google introduced version 3 was it came with performance improvements.
My impression is that the gap between the v2 and v3 has narrowed over the years with minor release updates, but there are still some areas where you can get more from the v3 API. One example reported by Kanshi Tanaike is to query Google Drive files by createdTime.
Google provide a Drive API v2 & v3 comparison guide, which highlights the main differences between the two versions of the API. To use v3 in your Apps Script project when you enable the Advanced Service for Drive you can select the version number.
Making the shared users input a value and upload a file without authorization of the scopes with a dialog on Google Spreadsheet.
It’s usually unavoidable when you are creating and sharing Apps Script projects that the user will be required to complete an authentication flow to approve access to the services you include in your script such as reading/writing to Google Sheets, Drive etc.
The process is reliant on OAuth scopes, which are identifiers that specify the level of access an application requests from a user’s Google Account data. They are essentially a way for developers to define the specific actions or data their application needs to access. When a user grants an application access to their Google Account, they are agreeing to allow the application to perform the actions or access the data specified by the scopes.
Sometimes you can restrict the ‘scope’, for example, usually for Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Forms where I need only permission for the current doc I will include the following documented comment to only require access to the doc that the script project is bound to:
/**
* @OnlyCurrentDoc
*/
There are some limitations when defining the scopes you need. For example if you would like a user to upload a document to Drive usually you would require the very broad https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive scope which will prompt the user to ‘view and manage all of your Drive files’.
Understandably users may become nervous approving such a scope and in some cases Google Workspace Admins may prevent authentication for this type of scope for unverified/unconfigured applications.
There are alternative approaches to allowing users to execute Apps Script projects without having to approve scopes like Google Drive. There are clearly security considerations when you do this, so always proceed with caution.
This post from Kanshi Tanaike has some examples of how users can be prompted to upload files to Google Drive without authorising Drive access. The post includes two approaches, the first using a Web App which is pre authenticated to run as the user who has deployed the Web App, the other using a service account. The source post contains all you need to know include the code.
Use Google Apps Script to automate email-based expense tracking. Store and track your receipts entirely through Gmail, Drive and Sheets
Here’s a nice tutorial on how to create an email-based expense tracking system using Google Apps Script. The solution allows users to submit expense reports via email, which are then automatically processed and stored in a Google Sheet with attachments stored in Google Drive.
The blog post by Joshua Mustill provides detailed instructions on how to set up the system, including how to create the Gmail labels and filters, the Google Sheet and the Apps Script code. There are some nice features in the code you might want to use in other projects including the creation of date based Google Drive folders for storing Gmail attachments.
Learn how extract all the embedded images from a Google Document or Google Slides presentation and save them as individual files in a specified folder in your Google Drive.
Often I’ll use Google Docs for drafting blog posts. With the introduction of Duet AI having a generative assistant in situ helps with the creative process. As well as text Google Docs is a really simple canvas for quickly copy/pasting screenshots. Copying content from Google Docs to WYSIWYG editors can sometimes be challenging, particularly, when it comes to images.
Next time I encounter this problem I’ll be using the script solution from Amit Agarwal, which can extract images from Google Docs and Slides and save them to Google Drive. I’m sure there are many other situations where this snippet could come in handy.
Unfortunately, there are no built-in methods for directly managing PDF data using Google Apps Script. Fortunately, after the V8 runtime has been released, several raw Javascript libraries could be used with Google Apps Script. pdf-lib is also one of them. When this is used, PDF data can be cooked over Google Apps Script. In this report, I would like to introduce achieving this using a Google Apps Script library.
Google Apps Script is a powerful tool for automating tasks. It can be used to process data, create spreadsheets, and send emails. One of the limitations of Apps Script is that it does not have built-in support for PDF files. However, there are a number of third-party libraries that can be used to work with PDF files and in Pulse we’ve featured a number of posts from Kanshi Tanaike where they have explored the pdf-lib is a JavaScript library.
This work has culminated in PDFApp, a dedicated Apps Script library created by Kanshi Tanaike based on the pdf-lib, but optimised for Apps Script. The source post includes a number of recipes for handling PDF files listed below:
Are you looking for a way to receive notifications in real-time when an important spreadsheet in your Google Drive get modified or is accidently deleted by sometimes? Well, Google Drive offers an API to help you set up a watch on any file in your Google Drive be it a document, presentation or even a PDF file. This means that you can receive instant notifications whenever the content or even permissions of that file changes.
This tutorial explains how you can setup watch notifications on any file in your Google Drive with the help of Google Apps Script.
As part of the Google Drive API you can set up watch notifications on any file in your Google Drive. This means you can receive instant notifications whenever the content or permissions of that file changes. This feature can be useful for a number of scenarios, for example, if you have sensitive Drive files that you want to closely monitor, or a workflow where you’d like to trigger additional events when a file is updated.
This post from Amit Agarwal explains how you can create a push notification for a Google Drive file using Google Apps Script. As noted in the post you can use Google Apps Script to handle the push notification by creating a doPost Web App, however, not all the response data/headers are available using Google Apps Script. There is a related ticket which had some activity earlier in the year and I would encourage you to star the request to get updates and encourage Google to fix – https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/67764685.
Google Workspace Admins looking for domain/user activity on Drive files might want to look at the Reports API activities endpoint, which can be configured to setup similar watch notifications. You can read more in the Reports API: Drive Activity Report overview.
