How does one one avoid 404's on changes.list thumbnails when signed in with multiple accounts?

Question

I am getting 404\'s for image thumbnails when I\'m signed on multiple accounts and making API calls for changes.list.

The full steps to reproduce the issue are descr

Answer 1

There are two ways to see a Google Document's thumbnail. After getting the URL of the thumbnail through the Google Drive API this URL can be viewed using either 'Cookie' authorization or OAuth 2.0 Authorization.

You seem to be using the 'Cookie' authorization (i.e. the user is currently signed in the browser). What happens is that the browser will use one of the two accounts by default and unfortunately it might not use the correct account. In that specific scenario you can append &authuser=0 or &authuser=1 to the URL of the thumbnail this will force using an account or the other, one of the two values will work.

The issue is that you don't know which value will work (1 or 0) so you would have to test the two URLs programmatically using Javascript to see which one works or fails.

The other way to load a thumbnail is to use OAuth 2 auth. This is more robust. You can do that easily by appending &access_token=. Make sure you use the same OAuth access token (formerly known as Bearer token) that you used in your API requests. This way you are sure that the image will load. this will even work if the user has signed-out of his Google Account. You will need access to the actual file's data. So this won't work if you have authorized the drive.readonly.metadata scope for instance. YOu need to authorize one of the following scopes:

• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.readonly

Just beware: access tokens are only valid for 1h.