How to Store Email Signature Images In Google Drive

This article has been updated as Google has recently changed the way they show file ids.

Back in 2014 Google made it much easier to add images store to Google Drive to Gmail signatures. However, we still get asked if it’s possible to use images store in Google Drive for a website or a 3rd party email signature applications. So here is our tip which allows you to securely use Google Drive as a repository for all your images.

Create a Public Folder

First, we would recommend that you create a folder within Google Drive which is accessible from the Internet. We believe that the most secure option for this is to create a folder which anyone with the link can view. This is done by changing the Sharing permissions on the folder:-

Now any files stored in the folder will be accessible from your website or 3rd party email signature HTML code.

Getting the Unique File URL

Now in order to embed the image within your code, you’re going to have to get the file id from the URL. This is done by selecting the file, now right click and select “Get link“.

This will give you the URL and the unique file id.

Unfortunately, this URL can’t yet be used within our HTML code as it opens the Google image viewer.

So we need to perform a little modification of the URL in order to access the image directly.

In this example, Google provided us with the URL https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O0f5oexsFqazv8T3CnMDv87sgSkEWjRo/view?usp=sharing to access the image directly we simply need to change the “file/d/” to “thumbnail?id=” like this, https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1O0f5oexsFqazv8T3CnMDv87sgSkEWjRo. You’re now good to go and embed this modified URL within your HTML.

Expert Tip

You can also add &sz=w{{width}}-h{{height}} at the end of the URL to resize your image so that you’re not sending large files within your email signature. We typically recommend using either width or height and let Google deal with the ratio for you. ie https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1O0f5oexsFqazv8T3CnMDv87sgSkEWjRo&sz=w50

But remember… if you’re using these images for an email signature make sure you don’t go crazy. Keep to our recommendations on email signature design and use appropriately sized image such as social buttons, or a nice banner.