1/26/24
9:00 am

How To Share Files and Folders With Anyone Using iCloud Drive

Sharing files with iCloud Drive is often a better solution than sending a file email or message. But it can be tricky to send a file or whole folder if the other person doesn't have an iCloud account.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can share files and folders using iCloud Drive with anybody, even if they don't have an iCloud account.
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So in this tutorial I'm going to show how to share a file or folder full of files over the internet using iCloud Drive. Now this will work whether or not the other person has an Apple account and can access their own iCloud Drive. If they don't things work a little differently but they can still get access to the files. With folders it is a little different but you can still share an entire folder full of files with them if you do it right. 
So, first let's look at how to share a single file. Here I am in the Finder looking at some of my files. Now it is important that these files already be in iCloud Drive. So in this case if I look at the folder I'm in. it's Projects. and in my Documents folder which is part of iCloud Drive in this case. If the file you want isn't in iCloud Drive, if it is in a local folder, then you need to move it into iCloud Drive. It doesn't matter where. It could be at the top level of iCloud Drive or you can create a folder inside of iCloud Drive to hold files. Whatever you want to do it has to be in iCloud Drive for you to be able to share a file using iCloud Drive. So seeing that all these files are I can now Share any one of them with iCloud Drive. 
To do this I would first select the file and then I need to bring up the sharing options. You can actually do this 3 different ways. One would be to go to File and then look for Share. You can see it brings it up like that. You could also, with that file selected, click this Share Button here at the top of the Finder window. That brings up the same options. Or you can Control Click, right click or two-finger click on a trackpad and then bring up the Context Menu and there you've got Share as well and it brings up, again, the same thing. So whichever way you choose you end up here. Now you've got a choice at the top for Collaborate or Send a Copy. There are really more options than this but they are hidden under these two major categories. Send A Copy will create a copy of that file and send it to that person. But Collaborate allows you to Share with them online, which is what you want. Collaborate also encompasses the idea of being able to collaborate using the same file which isn't what we're doing here. But it does fall under the umbrella of collaboration. 
So we'll select Collaborate. Then right under it, it is important you choose options here. Now it is set to only invited people who can edit. Well, we don't want it to be only invited people and we certainly don't want them editing this file. So we're going to select it here and change both of these options. We're going to change it to Anybody With a Link. That way the person doesn't have to have an iCloud Account setup for them to be able to have access. They can just access it with the Link they are going to get. Then Permissions we're going to change it from Can Make Changes to View Only. In other words all we're doing is giving them this file for them to copy. We don't want them to be able to change our file on our iCloud Drive. So we've got anyone with a Link, View Only. 
Now we need to send them this Link that's mentioned here. There are many different ways to do it. We're going to go with the Invite With Link option. This one will just give us a link and we can do whatever we want with it afterwards. So I'll select that and it is going to come up with this Invite With Link dialogue here and say preparing. After a couple of seconds it will be set and you'll notice here that the file now says, Shared By Me. So now it is shared. But where is the link? Well, if we use the Share Menu again either of those 3 options will work. I'll click here. Notice I've got Copy Link Now. That wasn't there before and if I Copy Link I've got the link here that I can send to anybody. I can send over Messages. I can send it over email. I could write it down on a piece of paper and they can type it in. Anyway would work for them to be able to get access to this file.
When you want to stop sharing a file all you need to do is select the file and then Control Click it, right click, or two-finger click to bring up the Context Menu. Go to Manage Share File which would appear underneath Share. Then you could see it there. Who it is shared with. You could see its permissions and you see a Stop Sharing button. Click that and now you've stopped sharing that file. 
Now what does the person on the other end see? Well, here's an email with one of these links just like the one I created. You can see what it looks like. It's got a lot of these random characters here to uniquely identify that file. The name of the file there at the end. If I click on it and it takes me there it says Open the Example Shared File which is the name of the file the other person shared with me. If I say Open it will open it directly. Notice that this example shared file now it is in my iCloud Drive. So I've got it in my iCloud Drive and they have it in their iCloud Drive. You can see instead of saying Shared By Me, it now says Shared By and the person sharing it. In this case my main user account rather than this demo account. I can double click and open this file here and here it is. Notice it says View Only. So I can't really do anything with it. If I had changed the option instead of View Only to I Can Edit, then I could actually edit the file and the changes would be seen by the owner of the file. We would be collaborating on this document. 
But in this case I just get it right here. I can't edit it. It is View Only. If I actually try to edit it, it's not going to let me. So typing any keys is not going to actually allow me to use it here. I can actually save a copy of it here. But I can actually save a copy of it here. Go to the File Menu. Hold the Option Key down and choose Save As. I'm going to save it as, you know, My Copy here of this file at the top level of my iCloud Drive folder. I could make changes to this one just fine. 
If I made a copy of this I know number one, the shared copy here in my iCloud Drive, I can Control Click it, right click it or two-finger click on a trackpad and I can see Managed Shared File and under this I can go and see there's the owner, there's me. I can click on the 3 dots to the right of me and say Remove Me. Now I no longer will have this file. But presumably I made my copy. 
Now also I could have opened this link in Safari. I'm going to Control Click it here and do Open With. Instead of iCloud I'm going to select Open With Safari. When I do that I get some options. So here I see the file and I can Add to iCloud Drive, which is what we were doing before. But I could also just click Download Copy and it will download it. I can see it in my list of downloaded files. So it is like I downloaded it from a website. So this might be an easier way to do it when receiving a file. Instead of sharing with somebody having Save As and then remove the shared file you can just open it in Safari here and use the Download A Copy link. 
Now what hereto happen if the person didn't have an iCloud Account or they weren't even using a machine that had iCloud capability. Well, they would end up at this webpage just like before. So you can see here they've got that Download A Copy link like before. But they also have Add to iCloud Drive. So if they actually do have iCloud Drive available they can click on this and it will ask them to log into their iCloud Drive Account. But the general idea is they would use the Download A Copy button here to get a copy of it and they didn't have to have an Apple ID and iCloud Account or anything in order to do this. 
Now sometimes you want to do more than one file. Maybe an entire folder filled with files. So, let's share this entire Projects folder. I'm going to go up one level here. There's the Projects Folder. Let's share that entire thing. So to do that you do exactly the same steps. Use one of 3 methods to bring up the Share controls. You can see here I can select Collaborate or Send a Copy as before. I use Collaborate. I'm going to change to anybody with a Link. I'm going to change to View Only. I'm going to select Invite With Link. It says preparing. You might get this if you already have items shared in here. I'm going to say, Share Anyway. It's going to say Preparing. Wait a little while. When that is done it will have a link ready to go. Now you can see the folder says, Shared By Me. If I go back to the Context Menu I can go to Share and I can Copy the Link. Now I have a link that I can send that is for an entire folder. 
But what does the person on the other end get? Well, here is a link to a shared folder. If I click on this you can see it does the same thing here. If I say Open, in this case this folder just called Shared Folder, and you can see it has got 3 files in it. If I go up a level you can see Shared Folder has been added to iCloud Drive. But I only have permission to read these files. I can't change them. So the same thing happens here. It's View Only. I have to save them out. If I want to I can take this whole folder here. I can do Command D to duplicate and I've got my Copy of the files here. Now I can go in here. I can go to Manage Shared Folder and get rid of the shared copy keeping my duplicate there. Or I could Control Click on the link. I can do Open With and go to Safari and I get a similar page here. But notice there is no Download Link. There's only Add to iCloud Drive. What if you're sharing this with somebody who doesn't have an iCloud Account or an Apple ID. 
Well.of course, one option is for them to get one. It is completely free to get an Apple ID and then they have an iCloud Drive Account with a minimum  amount of space. But certainly enough to share some files with. So, yes, this is something that you want to do with somebody else and they're on Windows or something they can just get a free Apple ID and then use iCloud.com or install iCloud Drive on their Windows machine and use it that way. 
But what if you don't want to ask the other person to do that. You want them to be able to download a folder full of files.How can you do that? Well, a simple way to do it is to convert a folder full of files to a single file.  You can do it by Control clicking, right clicking, or two-finger clicking to bring up that Context Menu and one of the options there is Compress. When you use that it will zip up the files and create a copy, right there. It doesn't get rid of the originals. It just creates this copy. So now I've got this new file here, Projects.zip, that has all of the contents of the Projects Folder. But compressed into a single file. A zip file is a cross-platform format. So anybody should be able to unzip the file and get to the files inside. Now that it is a single file I can share it just like a regular single file. I'll do Collaborate, Anybody with a Link, View Only. I'll invite with a Link. I'll wait for the link to be generated and then I will go back in, Share and Copy the link and then send them that link. Then they would be able to download this file and then probably just a double click will decompress it for them. 
Here's an example of that zip file from somebody. If I Control Click on it here and Open With Safari or if I just was on a machine that didn't have iCloud Drive, then you could see it brings up the same screen that we saw before where there is a Downloaded Copy button and I could use that and now I've got that zip file there. As a matter of fact Safari is going to automatically unzip all the contents of that. So for me, at least, I actually get the shared folder there in my Downloads Folder with all the files. The other person may or may not have similar capability where it's unzipping for them automatically or they may need to double click it to unzip or open it in whatever compression utility they use. 
But the basic idea is you've got a way by compressing it first, just one step, and then sharing that compressed file that you can share a whole folder full of files with somebody easily and they don't have to have an Apple ID or iCloud Account. 
Now there are other Cloud Services that make this a little easier. You can share with somebody else and there is this public link that they can get and download a file or folder full of files even if they don't have that same service. But, of course, that is extra steps for you and perhaps extra cost to have that Cloud Service. So it is important to know how to do this using the iCloud Service that you already have with your Mac. But what solution you use to share files between you and other people really depends on your specific situation. What you've got. What they've got and how often you need to do it. How easy you need to make it for yourself and for them.
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 20 Responses to “How To Share Files and Folders With Anyone Using iCloud Drive”

Sheldon

10 months ago

Thanks bunches

Bob Herwick

10 months ago

Gary, in sharing a folder with a Windows user, is it necessary to "copy the link" from the ZIP file? Can't you just email that ZIP file to the recipient? I suppose the link is better if it is is a very large folder. Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

Bob: I'm not a fan of emailing zip files or any files if I can help it. If the file is large (or even if it isn't) you don't know the other person's situation for bandwidth. They may have a slow connection, pay per MB for bandwidth, or have limited space in their email server account.

Dot

10 months ago

Thanks for showing us all the steps. It seems to be more complicated to generate a link than it used to be. Another advantage of sharing the file via iCloud is that it’s more secure than attaching it to an email. If you email the link, you can stop sharing as soon as the recipient has downloaded it, and the link will no longer work. If you email the file, it will be stored on both your server and the recipient’s server.

Jack

10 months ago

Great tutorial Gary. One more small tip that saves a step - when you share a file (or zip file) by selecting “Invite with Link”, you don’t need to go back to select “Copy Link”. After the file shows “Shared by Me”, the link is automatically copied to the clipboard. So if you open Messages, Mail, Notes, etc - you can just Paste (Command+V) and the link pops up!

Ian

10 months ago

Gary, thank you. When I've tried sharing a file before, usually for editing, with other iCloud users I've seen a warning saying the recipient will be able to see everything in the folder so I've become very nervous and not shared the file. Is this something you have seen before?

nick

10 months ago

Great tutorial Gary. No need to use a file-sharing site anymore. Cheers.

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

Ian: They definitely won't be able to see more than you shared. Are you sure you were doing iCloud sharing then? Sounds like maybe you were working with old-fashioned file sharing.

Ian

10 months ago

Thinking back to my use case it was sharing a Pages document from within Pages. The first person invited is ok but if I then add a second I get a warning about "New participants will be able to see all items on the folder. Folder containing this item is already shared".

I'm sharing a document from within Pages and my Pages folder on iCloud Drive is not shared.

I've found others asking about this warning on the Apple community.

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

Ian: Not sure what that could be. A search for that exact message doesn't turn up any pages in Apple Discussions.

Lucas

10 months ago

I recently tried to send via SMS a simple 1–page PDF to a friend who uses an Android phone of some sort. I don’t know whether he uses a PC. I’ll assume his phone is his only device. He reports that after two attempts at texting this PDF, he has never received it. Messages reports “Failed to send.” Your tutorial I found very helpful. Could you share a few words about sharing files with someone who uses an Android phone. Thanks!

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

Lucas: Sounds like the SMS system he uses can't handle that file. Use the method I show here instead. Always best to share files than send them via text or email.

Barry

10 months ago

Hi Gary,

Great tutorial, thanks. What’s frustrating is that I can no longer use collaboration for Pages (nor Keynote or Numbers) due to recently changed Mac system requirements. I’m running MacOS Monterey and can’t upgrade further. While iCloud folder sharing has been possible since Catalina, “collaboration” now requires Ventura. Yes, you can still use iCloud.com to collaborate, but that’s useless offline. Worse, this caused lost data in my file on Mac, w/o warning, when iCloud sync failed.

Kathy

10 months ago

Hi Gary, thank you for your wonderful work. Is it possible to password protect a file or folder prior to sharing from iCloud Drive as you've shown? I've only been able to find how to do this with a pages or numbers document where I'd password protect it before sharing. Thanks Gary

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

Kathy: Hard to give a good answer without knowing the details of the situation. But a general solution would be: https://macmost.com/two-ways-to-password-protect-files-on-your-mac.html

Brian

10 months ago

Gary, can this method be used for large (>1GB) video/movie files? I've been using Google Drive.

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

Brian: I suppose. Though if you are doing video work like that, there are specialty services that may be better. Like frame.io

John

9 months ago

One of your best videos. I use these features just infrequently enough that I forget how I made it work (after trial and error) the previous time. I have also had the same issue as Lucas above and will try this. Thank you.

Ray

4 months ago

Hi Gary. I have a large folder (in Finder) full of years of photos that I want to share this with my partners Mac/iCloud. If I use the 'share' option you mentioned and send her the link what does she actually get (excuse my naivety) - does she get a link to my folder and she is then able to view the photos and download to her own Mac or iPhone when required (this is what I want), or does she actually get photos loaded onto her own iCloud/Mac - I don't want to use her disk space or iCloud storage

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

Ray: It uses your iCloud Drive space, as the owner of the folder.

How To Share Files and Folders With Anyone Using iCloud Drive

Comments: 20 Responses to “How To Share Files and Folders With Anyone Using iCloud Drive”

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