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I confess: When it comes to storing files in the cloud, I am firmly in Microsoft's region of the sky. The company's OneDrive currently holds all my crucial data, including my entire music collection, five years' worth of pictures, and every single Word document and PowerPoint presentation I've reason to hold on to. Unfortunately, there isn't much I can do with all this data unless I sync it to a desktop or a mobile device. OneDrive might be a great backup service, but when it comes to manipulating all this data, it's next to useless.
This is where Google Drive shines. Thanks to built-in integration with literally hundreds of third-party apps, Drive not only stores all your files, it brings powerful, PC-like capabilities straight to your browser.
To access these apps, open your Google Drive and click on the Gear icon on the right. Click "Manage apps" and then click "Connect more apps" in the window that pops up. Welcome to your new life in the browser. Check out your superpowers below.
Combine multiple PDFs
It's kind of unbelievable, but Adobe actually wants you to shell out $10 a month and install its bloated, insecure Reader for the privilege of being able to combine two or more documents into one single PDF. That's obviously crazy. If all you want to do is merge some PDFs into one single file, simply connect PDF Mergy to your Google Drive. You can then select any number of PDF files in Google Drive and snap them into a single, seamless PDF that you can then save to Drive or download to your desktop.
Edit photos
If you want to crop, straighten, brighten, adjust the focus, or add over 250 effects to your images, you no longer have to leave your browser. Heck, you don't even have to leave Google Drive. Thanks to Pixlr Express, you can choose to save the processed images to your Drive, use them to replace the original image, or download them to your computer.
Convert anything … to anything
Hook up CloudConvert to your Google Drive and never worry about file formats again. CloudConvert supports over a hundred file formats for videos, music, ebooks, and zip archives. Once you uploaded your file, simply select the output format and let CloudConvert chug away. You can convert AVI videos into MP4, for instance, for MOBI ebooks into standard PDFs that open on all your devices. You can even dive right in and fine-tune conversion options (adjust resolution or bitrate for videos, for instance). But the best part about CloudConvert is that it accepts Dropbox in addition to Google Drive as an input or an output destination. That means you can start a conversion on one service and have your converted file appear magically in the other.
Edit audio in the browser
Nothing beats Audacity, the free, open-source audio editor for Mac and PC. But if you don't want to leave your browser, TwistedWave is a close second. It allows you to import sound files directly from your Google Drive and then provides you with the traditional waveform, effects, mono-stereo conversation, pitch correction, and a lot more directly in the browser. When you're finished, you can export the sound file back to Drive or directly to SoundCloud.
