Google Drive – Moving multiple files & folders

In this post, we’ll see the different ways you can move multiple files and folders around on your Drive.

Click on the first file you want to move, then hold down Ctrl (or Cmd) and then click on the other files you want to move.  The ones that you have chosen will be highlighted in blue.

Or if the files you want are all together, click on the top one, hold down the Shift key, then click on the bottom one.  All the files from the top to the bottom one will then be highlighted.

a) Moving to a folder within the files and folder area

Once you have your files or folders highlighted, just drag them to the folder you want to move them to.  A blue circle with the number of files you’re moving will appear as you move it. It turns blue when it’s moved over the top of a folder.

b) Moving to a folder on the menu on the left-hand side

On the menu on the left-hand side, you will see “My Drive”.  If you’ve already created another folder in My Drive, then you will see a little triangle to the side of My Drive.

Click on the triangle next to the My Drive icon and the next level of folders will be shown.  In this case, I just have one called “Example folder”.

This also has a triangle next to it, so I click on that and it opens the next level of folders.  In this case, I have one called “First folder”.

That’s the one I want, so I just click on the file or folder, hold the button down and drag it to the folder I want, then let go of the mouse button.

This is useful for when you want to move files and folders to other folders which are more than one level down.  You can also the left-hand menu to navigate to the folders you want.

c) Drag and drop to the breadcrumbs

We can also drag and drop files and folders to a folder in the breadcrumbs.

d) Right-click menu > “move to”

Right-click on the file or folder you want to move. This brings up a menu and then click on “Move to”.

This brings up the “Move to” box.  By default, it brings up the current folder you’re in.  If you want to change folders then click on the arrow next to the folder, in this case “First folder”. This will go up one level of folders, in this case to the “Example folder”.

Let’s put it in the “Example folder”. Click on “Move here”. This then moves the file to the new folder.

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If you want to move all the files and folders within the files and folder area, just click on a file or folder and then press Ctrl and A together to select all the files and folders (Cmd + A on a Mac).

If you want to select all the files but don’t want specific ones, you can select them all using Ctrl + A, let go, then holding the Ctrl key down, click on the files or folders you don’t want to include.  This will then deselect them and the blue highlight will be removed.

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