Google Forms: All you should know about the new file upload feature

Post date: Oct 19, 2016 9:15:56 AM

The file upload option is now available in Google Forms!

Whether you are a teacher who wants to collect students’ homework assignments, a recruiter who needs to get all applicants’ resumes, or a real estate agent who requires important information on a client such as the ID card, you are all looking for the option to include a file upload button in your Google Form, so that your respondents can easily add documents to their form submission.

You might recall those darks days when you had to find complicated workarounds to compensate for this missing feature (e.g. using Google Apps Script and adding some HTML code). This now belongs in the past!

To address this growing need, Google has released a bunch of new features, which include the highly anticipated ‘file upload’ button into your Google Form!

Note: This file upload option is only available for G Suite customers with a Google Form shared within their organization. EDIT: Since 7/10/2017, all users with a Google account (G Suite and Gmail) can now upload files to a Form, and not only people from the same G Suite domain.

What does this new feature look like?

Like any other type of question (short answer, multiple choice, date etc.) that is already available in Google Forms, you will see a new entry called ‘File upload’. As the form creator, all you need to do is to add a new question, and select this option in the list:

In the ‘File upload’ parameters, you can indicate the maximum file size (from 1 MB to 10 GB) and select which file types are allowed:

Once the button is added, your respondents will be able to upload their file to the form submission from the Docs picker. They can either upload a file from their computer or pick one available in their Drive:

Note: For the moment, respondents are not allowed to upload a whole folder. They can only upload a unique file for each ‘File upload’ item in your form (but you can have more than one ‘File upload’ item in your form).

For example, people can upload one resume and one cover letter (= 2 'File upload' questions) for a job application on the same Google Form:

Uploaded files storage and ownership transfer to Google Form creator

For each ‘File upload’ item inserted in your form, a Drive folder is automatically created. By default, it reuses your form question as the folder title:

You can retrieve this folder by going to the ‘RESPONSES’ tab of your Google Form, and clicking ’VIEW FOLDER’:

A link to each file is also visible in this form responses tab, alongside the responses spreadsheet if you have linked a Google Sheet to your form:

If a respondent decides to upload a file directly from his Drive, a copy will be made and the form owner will become owner of the copy. You will be able to track this whole process in the recent ‘Activity’ sidebar of your Google Drive.

The process of the uploaded file ownership transfer works as follows:

• 1. A copy of the file is uploaded to the Google Form by a respondent

  2. The ownership of this copy is then automatically transferred to the form owner

  3. The copy is finally automatically added to the form owner's appropriate folder

Form Publisher + file upload

Form Publisher lets you choose between two options for your file upload questions:

• • You can choose to insert the link to the uploaded file in your document, see the article about link insertion on our documentation.

  • If the file is an image (png, jpg, gif) you can choose to insert it directly as an image in your document as explained in our article about image insertion.

Further updates will come soon, so stay tuned and keep an eye on our blog!