Besides the plain link, every share offers ready-made embed snippets for the three places links usually end up in a decorated form: HTML for websites, BBCode for forums, and Markdown for READMEs, issues and docs.
Where to find them
Look for the collapsed Embed panel:
- on the upload success screen — anonymous uploads included;
- in the share dialog of any file in your Drive;
- on the share page itself, in its share dialog.
Pick the dialect with the tabs and copy with one click.
Images get thumbnails, everything else gets a link
- Image shares produce a clickable-thumbnail snippet: the image shows inline where you paste it, and clicking leads to the share page.
- Video, audio and documents produce link-only snippets — tidy, labelled links without a preview image.
- Folder shares and password-protected shares are always link-only, deliberately: a thumbnail would not be accessible to strangers anyway.
One quirk worth knowing: right after an upload, an image snippet may briefly render without its thumbnail while the preview image is being generated. It fixes itself — no need to re-copy.
The snippet follows the share's rules
An embed is just a dressed-up share link, so everything that governs the link governs the embed: a password still gates it, an expiry or revocation still kills it — wherever the snippet was pasted.