A client shares a Google Drive folder. Inside are 60 subfolders and 1,722 photos, sorted by tour, by guide and by season. Your job is to get them onto the website. The usual route is slow. You download the folder as a zip, unpack it, upload thousands of camera-sized files, then try to remember which photo came from which folder. The structure your client spent hours building is gone the moment you unzip. Drive Media Importer skips all of that. Paste the folder link, and every image comes into your Media Library at web size, tagged with the name of the folder it came from.
It finds every folder
Paste one link or several, one per line. The plugin walks every subfolder up to ten levels deep, follows Drive shortcuts, and works with Shared Drives and folders that have been shared with you. Before anything downloads, you see a table: each folder, how many images it holds, how many are already in your Media Library, and the tag each will get. Untick any folder you don’t want.
Folder names become tags
Each image is tagged with the name of the folder it sits in. If you’d rather keep the whole path, switch to path mode and a photo in Clients / Smith Wedding / Ceremony gets all three tags. Tags go into a Media Tags taxonomy, or into your regular post tags if you prefer. In the Media Library’s list view you can filter by tag, so finding every Ceremony photo takes one dropdown.
Web-sized on the way in
Phones and cameras produce 4,000-pixel images. Your website needs about half that. Set a maximum size and the plugin resizes each image as it arrives, before WordPress builds its thumbnails.
Maximum edge: 2048 px suits most sites. Set 0 to keep full size.
Quality: JPEG and WebP quality for the image and every thumbnail.
WebP: convert JPEG, PNG and HEIC photos to WebP when your server supports it.
iPhone photos: HEIC files are always converted, because browsers can’t display HEIC.
Originals: discard them to save disk space (they’re still in Drive), or keep them alongside.
In testing, a 4000×3000 JPEG arrived as a 1600×1200 WebP of about 27 KB.
Built for big folders
Batches: a few images per request, so shared hosting doesn’t time out.
Pause and resume: stop an import and pick it up later, even after closing the browser tab.
No duplicates: every image remembers its Drive file. Run the same folder again and only new photos download.
A clear report: skipped and failed files are listed with the reason, and failures can be retried with one click.
Daily limit: optionally cap how many images import per day.
Connecting to Google
The folders don’t need to be public. The plugin signs in as a Google account that can open them, with read-only access. It can list and download files. It can’t change, move, delete or share anything in Drive. There are three ways to connect:
Connect with Google (Pro): one button. Sign in with the right Google account and you’re done.
Your own Google Cloud app (free): paste a Client ID and secret from your own Google Cloud project. Setup takes about 20 minutes, with step-by-step instructions on the plugin’s documentation page.
Service account (free): paste a service account key and share your folders with its email address.
Your photos never pass through our servers
Connect with Google uses Web321’s sign-in service to sign you in and renew access about once an hour. That’s all it does. Images download straight from Google to your website. Saved keys and tokens are encrypted on your site with its own security keys. You can disconnect from the plugin at any time, or remove access from your Google Account under Security.
Free and Pro
The free plugin does every import, tag and resize. Pro adds the one-click Google connection and keeps it running, so neither you nor your clients ever open Google Cloud Console.
Licences, checkout and sales tax are handled by Freemius, our licensing partner. If a plan lapses, everything you’ve imported stays in your Media Library.
Who this is for
Agencies and freelancers whose clients hand over photos as a shared Drive folder.
Tour operators, venues and event organizers with seasons of photos sorted by trip, room or date.
Photographers and studios delivering galleries to a client’s WordPress site.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the folder have to be public?
No. The plugin signs in as a Google account that can open the folder, so restricted folders and folders shared with you both work. With the free version you can also share the folder with a Google service account. What happens if I import the same folder twice?
Images already in your Media Library are skipped and only their tags are refreshed. Photos added to the folder since last time are imported. Which files does it import?
Any image your site accepts: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF and HEIC. Google Docs, PDFs and videos are ignored. GIFs are never resized, so animations keep working. Will it fill up my hosting?
Large photos are scaled to the size you choose, and the full-size original can be discarded because it’s still in Drive.
Google showed an “unverified app” screen. Is that expected?
Yes, while Google completes its review of the app. Click Advanced, then continue. Access is still read-only. What happens when my Pro plan ends?
Connect with Google stops renewing access, so new imports pause. Everything you’ve imported stays put, and you can switch to a free connection method at any time.
Can Web321 run the import for us?
Yes. If you’d rather hand it off, we can set it up and run the import as part of a WordPress support plan.
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