Access to local folder with Colab

Question

I want to make a deep learning system on Colab. My data are stored in a local folder on my laptop but I don't know how to acceed it.

When I do this, it gives me an error :

import os
output = [dI for dI in os.listdir(main_folder) if os.path.isdir(os.path.join(main_folder,dI))]
print (output)

[Errno 2] No such file or directory:

main_folder is a local path : C:/.../.../

Solution

One option to access local files is to use Colab with a local install of Jupyter. Instructions to do that are here:

http://research.google.com/colaboratory/local-runtimes.html

Another option is to install Google Drive on your local machine, put the files there, and then mount your Drive files on Colab using the following snippet:

from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/gdrive')

After that, your Drive files will appear in the built-in file browser. For example,

Comments

[matanster]

I guess with the google drive way, you'd load the files in the notebook's code a la stackoverflow.com/a/51940120/1509695

[user96265]

I tried what was in the manual, got the link, connected locally and did a os.listdir(...) and it worked the first time. Then it said, PermissionError: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted: '/Users/esfandiar/...' This is extremely frustrating.

[Wolfram Arnold]

There is now also a way to mount Google Drive straight from the UI without issuing any commands.