How I used Claude to bring sanity to my Google Drive

I've been using Google Drive since it came out and I've been fully cloud drive pilled my entire adult life. Why would I want the liability of having things I care about on drives that I can spill coffee on, drop on the floor, or be stolen by a burglar (a whole other story)? While I used to be a folder zealot, 20 years of usage have led to an unmanageable amount of clutter.

And by unmanageable I mean 144,678 files totaling over 410GB of data.

First, I'd never attempt to tackle this problem without Claude, but as others have written recently, Claude dramatically lowers the barrier to projects I'll attempt on my computer.

With this project, I started with the design. I used a /brainstorm Claude Code skill, which is a fork of the superpowers brainstorm skill customized for my own idiosyncrasies. The brainstorm phase involved Claude interviewing me to get a sense of the scope and goals of the project. It helped me clarify my ideas from "I need organize Google Drive good" to I'd like a new folder taxonomy, consistent naming conventions, and an audit log so that any change can be easily undone.

After the design phase, Claude walked me through Google OAuth Setup, which I've done before and absolutely didn't need any help with. Essentially this lets Claude run code on my behalf in the Google ecosystem. Claude initially only needed read access, but later we added full write abilities.

One outcome of the design was the realization that we were planning for a lot of contingencies that we could either prioritize or rule out entirely by doing some actual discovery. Claude built itself a number of tools for scanning my Google Drive so that it could get full drive stats and current folder structure.

We found that a big chunk of my Google Drive is made up of Google Photos that are already organized by date. We also discovered multiple Google Takeout metadata folders which I had accumulated over the years. By actually examining Google Drive we were able to reduce the scope from 144k files to just over 6k files that needed to be reorganized.

We wrapped up by having Claude create an implementation plan of all the code it would need to write in order to move, rename, and delete files and folders with an audit log. It also created a Claude skill that I could invoke to orchestrate the reorganization process.

Next I opened a new Claude Code session and executed the plan. Claude created all the code it needed to organize my Google Drive. I then ran the /organize-drive skill, which had Claude start by scanning the in-scope files and proposing a folder taxonomy. I provided some feedback and we went back and forth until we landed on a schema that felt right to me.

Once Claude was ready, I ran the new /organize-drive skill again and we started processing files in the root directory. I gave Claude my naming convention preference. It created "mark for delete" and "mark for review" folders. It processed between 10 and 100 files in the first few batches. After each batch I had Claude optimize, refine, and improve the /organize-drive skill.

Now my drive is super neat. I'm pretty sure I'm not missing anything. And we are all living in the future where you can tell your computer what you want it to do in plain language and it is very happy to oblige.