How to Access Local Files in Google Colab

If you have a file or a set of files that you want to access as data in Google Colab, then you can try one of the below options.

Option 1: Using the Upload File Script

from google.colab import files

files_uploaded = files.upload()

Once you add this to one of the cells of your Notebook, you will see "choose files" option, when you click on it, you will be able to upload files from your local (Windows/Linux/Mac) PC.




• data.txt(text/plain) - 18 bytes, last modified: n/a - 100% done

Saving data.txt to data.txt

Once the file(s) is uploaded, you will see it as logs and can be accessed using filename.


Example of reading the just uploaded local file.

with open("data.txt", "r") as file:
    content = file.read()
    print(content)

1,100
2,200
3,300

Option 2: Access Files from Google Drive

One other way is to upload your local files to Google Drive and access them by mounting them using the below code.

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

This is not an AI-generated article but is demonstrated by a human on an M1 Mac running macOS Sonoma 14.0.

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