Google Drive on the web rolling out hovercard preview

Abner Li | May 16 2024 - 3:15 pm PT

The Google Drive website is rolling out a nice quality of life improvement that lets you preview files from the list view using hovercards.

At the moment, you have to open each finally or right-click > Open with > Preview, which gets you a fullscreen preview.

Additionally, if you want to see what updates have been made to a file, you have to open the file and view the Activity Dashboard.

You can now “place your cursor over a file icon in Google Drive on the web.” This opens a hovercard that includes the file name and a landscape thumbnail, which is most useful for images and Slides. It might help with Docs, but not Sheets. These previews are the same as the ones that appear inside documents when you hover over a link or chip.

At the bottom, you’ll see file type, file owner, and “who recently modified the file and when they last modified the file.” You can also quickly star/favorite in the top-right corner.

This new experience may help save time by enabling you to gain context on your files without having to open the information sidebar to view details and recent activity.

The Google Drive hovercards are rolling out over the coming weeks for “all Google Workspace customers, Google Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts.”