I’ve got a bunch of PDF files stored in my Google Drive account and they all have really messy names with underscores everywhere. Like instead of ‘Monthly Report January’ the files are named ‘Monthly_Report_January’. There are hundreds of these files and manually changing each one would take forever.
I was wondering if there’s a way to use Google’s API to automatically go through all my PDF files and replace those annoying underscores with regular spaces. Has anyone done something like this before? I’m not sure which API endpoints I should be looking at or if this is even possible to do in bulk.
Any help or code examples would be really appreciated since I’m pretty new to working with Google’s APIs.
Been there with messy file names. Google Drive API can handle this, but setting up authentication and batch operations is a pain.
You’ll need Drive API v3 - files.list to grab your PDFs and files.update to rename them. The annoying part is dealing with pagination for hundreds of files and API rate limits.
I had a similar cleanup last year with thousands of files. Instead of wrestling with API docs and rate limiting, I used Latenode to connect directly to Google Drive.
My workflow lists all PDFs, loops through each one, and swaps underscores for spaces. Takes 10 minutes to set up and handles the API stuff automatically. You can add filters for specific folders or patterns too.
Latenode handles authentication, pagination, and retry logic if things fail. Way easier than coding from scratch.
Google Apps Script works but crawls with large batches. Direct API calls handle hundreds of files better, but the setup’s a nightmare.
Just dealt with this last month - 800+ client docs with garbage naming. Tried the API route first but kept slamming into rate limits and auth timeouts.
Ended up using Latenode instead. Built a simple automation that hits Google Drive, finds PDFs with underscores, and bulk renames them. It chunks the files so you don’t murder the API limits.
My setup checks for dupes before renaming and logs everything so you can double-check. Run it overnight and wake up to clean filenames.
The visual builder makes it dead simple to add rules - skip certain folders, keep underscores in special cases, whatever.
15 minutes to build versus hours of coding and debugging API hell. Plus you can preview changes before nuking your whole batch.
Yeah, Google Drive API handles bulk renaming through the files.update endpoint. First authenticate with OAuth2, then use files.list with mimeType='application/pdf' to grab all your PDFs. For each file, call files.update with your cleaned filename - just replace underscores with spaces using string replacement.
Rate limits are the pain point here. Google caps you at 1000 requests per 100 seconds per user. With hundreds of files, you’ll definitely hit this, so add exponential backoff for 403 responses. Also heads up - if files end up with identical names after cleaning, Google Drive automatically tacks on numbers.
I’d test with a small batch in a subfolder first. Make sure your auth and error handling work before unleashing it on everything.
Yeah, totally doable but heads up - you’ll get duplicate names once you strip those underscores. I learned this the hard way cleaning up invoice files and ended up with 20 files all named “invoice jan 2024”. Google Drive just tacks on (1), (2) etc which probably isn’t what you’re after. I’d add some logic to catch dupes before running the bulk rename.
Try Google Apps Script instead of jumping straight into the API. I did something similar last month with 300+ scanned docs that had awful naming. Apps Script runs in Google’s environment, so you skip the authentication mess. Use DriveApp.getFilesByType() to grab your PDFs, then loop through with file.setName(). It handles rate limiting automatically and you won’t fight with OAuth tokens. One thing that bit me - files with multiple underscores created weird double spaces after replacement. I fixed it with regex: filename.replace(/_+/g, ’ ').trim(). Also check if some underscores actually matter, like version numbers or department codes. The script editor in Drive is pretty easy even if you’re new to APIs. Test on a small folder first and add some logging to see what’s getting renamed.