Google Drive integration
Connect Google Drive and Mindly indexes the files you choose: Google Docs, PDFs, text, Markdown, images. Each one gets AI tags, summaries, and connections to everything else you have saved.
Setup in minutes
What you can do with it
You have hundreds of Google Docs and uploaded PDFs accumulated over years: meeting notes, drafts, project briefs, papers, contracts. Drive search works only inside Drive and only on titles you remember. Mindly reads the full content of each file and makes it findable by topic, or by a phrase you remember from inside it.
You write drafts in Google Docs, but the supporting PDFs, screenshots, and notes live elsewhere. Mindly puts all of it under one search and one mind map. The draft and the source material stop being in two places.
Meeting notes in Drive are useful for a week and forgotten after that. Imported into Mindly, they get tagged by project, summarized by AI, and connected to other meetings on the same topic. The pattern across months becomes visible.
A typical Drive holds Docs, PDFs, images, scanned receipts, exported Word files, Markdown drafts. Mindly handles all of them through one connection: full-text indexing for text-based files, OCR-style tagging for images. The doc you need is one Mindly search away regardless of format.
How the integration behaves
Drive search treats body content as second-class for most file types. Mindly indexes the full text of Google Docs, PDFs, text files, and Markdown stored in Drive, so a phrase you wrote in paragraph three becomes findable months later without remembering the filename.
A 12-page strategy doc gets a paragraph summary in Mindly. A 40-page PDF gets the same treatment. Scanning what is in your Drive becomes scanning a list of summaries instead of opening every file.
Once a folder is connected, new files created or uploaded into it show up in Mindly within a short window. No manual import, no daily routine.
The integration only requests permission to read the folders and files you select. Mindly cannot edit, delete, rename, or share anything in your Drive. You can revoke access from your Google Account settings at any time.
Why it matters
Google Drive is excellent for storing and collaborating on files. It is mediocre at being a long-term knowledge base for one person. The longer you use Drive, the worse the "find the thing I saved" problem gets. Drive search assumes you remember filenames; you do not. The folder structure assumes you put things in the right place; you did not. The result is a slow, accumulating cost: files you saved three years ago that contained useful material are effectively gone because the cost of finding them outweighs the cost of recreating the work. The Mindly Google Drive integration solves the long-term problem without forcing you to leave the short-term tool. You keep working in Drive. You search and find in Mindly. The split between storage tool and memory tool turns out to be exactly right.
Common questions
Reads the Google Drive folders and files you grant access to and imports their content into your Mindly library on your Mac. Each supported file (Google Docs, PDFs, text, Markdown, images) is indexed, AI-tagged, summarized, and made searchable alongside the rest of your second brain.
Google Docs (native, full text), PDFs (full text via parsing), text files, Markdown, and image files (visual tagging plus OCR). Other Google formats including Sheets and Slides have basic title-and-metadata indexing today, with deeper parsing on the roadmap.
No. The integration only requests read-only permission. Mindly cannot edit, delete, rename, share, or move anything in your Drive. The sign-in flow shows exactly which permission is being requested.
Yes for any file created or uploaded into a folder you have connected. New files are picked up in the background within a short window. You do not need to manually re-import.
Yes. Disconnecting stops the sync but keeps already-imported files in your Mindly library. They become regular Mindly items at that point, no longer linked to the live Google source.
Imported file contents live in your local Mindly library on your Mac. AI tagging and summarization run on cloud APIs, so file content is sent for processing when imported. After that, the imported copy sits locally. Read the privacy policy for the full breakdown.
Google Docs and uploaded files (PDFs, text, images) are fully supported today. Native Sheets and Slides get title and metadata indexing for now; full content parsing for both is on the roadmap. You can manually export a Sheet or Slide deck as PDF and import it via Quick Capture if you need deeper indexing immediately.
Other integrations
Download Mindly, connect Google Drive, and search every file you have saved from one place.
