If your company uses Google Apps or your just a fan of Google services, then you’re probably using Drive as your cloud file syncing tool.

When you want to share those files with others, you can specify who has access and grab a link via Sharing Settings. However, click that link and you’ll find that for many file types, instead of the browser downloading the file, the Google Drive viewer is displayed. For example, a .ZIP archive:

ZIP archive in Google Drive viewer

One can click File > Download (⌘S) on this page but it becomes a 2-step operation. In order to directly download a file, we have to tweak the link.

The Link to share for my file is:

<code><a href="https://docs.google.com/a/pebbleit.com/file/d/0B05UA09uJtEDNjRPNURtbEk3MWM/edit?usp=sharing">https://docs.google.com/a/pebbleit.com/file/d/0B05UA09uJtEDNjRPNURtbEk3MWM/edit?usp=sharing</a>
</code>

The penultimate part of the URL, 0B05UA09uJtEDNjRPNURtbEk3MWM, is the file’s ID. Add it to the end of https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id= to create a link that will directly download the file:

<code><a href="https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&amp;id=0B05UA09uJtEDNjRPNURtbEk3MWM">https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&amp;id=0B05UA09uJtEDNjRPNURtbEk3MWM</a>
</code>

Hopefully Google will add this feature soon so this manual tinkering will no longer be required.
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