
If you frequently handle user-submitted file uploads on your WordPress site, you'll likely want to place them on a cloud storage provider like Google Drive. By sending your file uploads to a cloud storage provider such as Google Drive, you will not only have a backup in the event of a disaster, but your web host will likely be much happier with them off of your server. In this article, we'll show you how to easily send any file uploads from your WordPress form directly to Google Drive.
Requirements
Before you begin, you'll want to make sure you have a few things:
- Gravity Forms.
- The Gravity Forms Zapier Add-On.
- A Zapier account.
- A Google Drive account.
Connecting Your Form to Zapier

In this tutorial, we'll be using Zapier to handle the file upload and pass it on to Google Drive. If you're not familiar with Zapier, it's a tool that allows you to connect multiple services together with an incredibly simple, yet powerful user interface.
- First, log into your Zapier account and create a new Zap using the Make a Zap button on the top right of the page.
- Inside your new Zap, you'll now need to select the source that will be feeding the information to Zapier. In this case, select Gravity Forms.
- After selecting Gravity Forms, you'll be given a Webhook URL. Copy it somewhere; You'll need it later.
- You'll now need to add that Webhook URL to Gravity Forms. In a new tab, open your WordPress admin dashboard.
- From within your WordPress admin, access the form that you want to use, hover over Settings, then click on Zapier.
- Click Add New to add a new Zapier feed.
- Inside the Webhook URL field, enter the Webhook URL that you got earlier from Zapier.
- Make any additional changes based on your preferences such as the feed name, then save your changes.
Once complete, you'll want to make a test submission on the form and then continue on with the Zapier setup. When you submitted your test submission, Zapier should have detected all of your form fields, making them ready to use inside your newly created Zap.
Sending Form Uploads to Google Drive

Now it's on to the fun part! After just a few more steps, you'll be ready to send your files directly to Google Drive!
- After you configured your form to send data to Zapier in the previous steps, Zapier will prompt you to define an action step inside your Zap. Select Google Drive, then select Upload File.
- If you've never previously used Google Drive with Zapier, you'll be prompted to add a Google Drive account. To do so, follow the steps to log into your Google Drive account and authorize access to Zapier.
- Next, Zapier will need a bit more information to send the correct form data to Zapier. The first field is the drive inside Google Drive that you want to use. If you don't have a specific drive that you want to add files to, just select My Google Drive.
- You'll also need to provide Google Drive with a location that they can access the file from. In this case, it will be the URL of the file that's uploaded to the form. Select the name of your file upload field, which should contain the URL of the file that was uploaded.
- Finally, make changes to any other fields that you might want to customize here. For example, if you want to put the file in a separate folder, you can use the Folder option to select the folder you want to use.
Once your settings are how you want them to be, click Continue. Zapier will then test the submission. If you followed the steps correctly, you should see a message stating that your file was successfully uploaded to Google Drive. If not, go through the steps again to be sure that you didn't miss anything. Of course, don't forget to enable your Zap so that it'll work each time a submission occurs!
Finishing Up
Now that you've configured your WordPress form to send file uploads to Google Drive, be sure to check over your work by sending a few test submissions, then checking Google Drive for them. From here, you can do more things such as:
- Renaming files by setting the file name in your Zapier configuration.
- Share access to others when files are uploaded.
Have a question or comment? Let us know in the comments below.
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Excellent post and well detailed. I actually just set this up a few weeks ago but I found my files went both to Google Drive AND the entries through GF on my host server.
Is the setup above only sending files to Google Drive and bypassing uploading files to the host server as well?
thx in advance.
Yes, it'll only send the files. Deleting them is something you'll still need to do manually. Of course, you could always write up a script that handles it automatically for you.
Hi @Jeff Matson
I am looking to get the files uploaded through one of my forms directly to google drive, however I am having issues with the "File" field in the Zapier dashboard.
I select the field name in the Zapier form and it gives me this url:
http://domain.dev/some_location/file.png
How do i find the correct url? The files uploaded to my form have different names, naturally.
Could you help me?
If you're selecting the field, Zapier will automatically adjust it for each subsequent submission, based on the current file in the field.
I don't get the file upload field. What URL is this referring to?
Could you clarify a bit on what you're referring to? The File Upload field is included within the main Gravity Forms plugin in the Advanced Fields section.
This is great, and just implemented it on a website and it's working great. All of the file(s) are dumping to the single folder however. I'd like to do to keep the files segregated into sub folders based on submissions. A) first create a folder using some GF field data (such as name, date, etc.) and then B) save the file(s) to that new folder. I added an intermediate "Create Folder" action. But in the Upload File action, I cannot seem to find out how to save the file to the newly created folder. Would you know how?
(I've been a GF user for nearly 2 years now but still very basic in my knowledge)
I thought the file upload field was for dropbox? Am I able to get the file upload field and it not be tied to dropbox?
Thanks for any response. I do ask you be overly detailed for my learning curve.
I was confused on the dropbox portion!
I have been able to get Zapier to create a new file and document from my form but it is carrying over links to my images rather than placing the images within the document. Is there any way to get the images to show rather than the links?
Thank you for any assistance and feedback!
Thank you for this! Is there a way to allow users to upload multiple files with one form submission?
Zapier is not HIPAA compliant so there should be an option for Gravity PDF to save directly to Google Drive without having to use a non HIPAA complaint service. Any chance this integration can be enabled directly for Google Drive without Zapier?
Gravity PDF isn't one of our plugins. You'll need to contact the developer at https://gravitypdf.com/ to suggest new features or integrations.