Smart Chips: Google Drive is getting the ability to filter files by person or group you’ve shared with

This week on Google’s Workspace Updates blog, the company announced a new Smart Chip filter feature. For those unaware or who simply don’t recall, Smart Chips are a horizontal bar at the top of Drive, Gmail and other Google services that lets you quickly add search modifiers without using the search bar itself.

Now, a new filter is being added for files and folders that you’ve shared with specific people or groups. Wondering what groups are? I was too! As it turns out, it’s a feature in Workspace that lets you set groups of people in your organization into different named categories for easier bulk sharing of content and management.

Whether you’re trying to share a file with more audiences or reduce oversharing, this feature will give you greater visibility into who has access to files within and outside of your organization. 

Google Workspace Updates

Once this rolls out to you, which is currently happening on a staged basis, all you need to do is select the ‘People’ chip at the top of the screen in Drive and start searching for or hand selecting people and groups that appear there from your Contacts.

Then, just choose the ‘Shared with’ option for that specific person or group, and voilà – the results will speak for themselves! If you want to find files shared outside of your organization instead, just click the same people filter and choose the ‘External users’ option instead on the ‘Shared Drive’, ‘Shared with me’, ‘Recent’, or even ‘My Drive’ sections.

Anyone with a personal Google Account or even Workspace license (all licenses!) will get to make use of this when it finally appears. Those with a Rapid Release domain will already see it showing up as of November 9th, and through the next week or so. Those with a Scheduled Release domain will begin seeing it around December 5, 2023 and it will take two weeks to be fully available as well.