You’re asking the Drive million-dollar question, and honestly, despite all the fanfare about browser drag-and-drop and third-party tools, let’s not pretend this is ever totally frictionless. @mikeappsreviewer and @jeff have some solid takes—CloudMounter is worth a look for that finder-style integration if you’re in Mac-land (Windows options exist too but mileage varies), and zipping your batch into a single file saves a LOT of pain points with failed transfers or weird browser behavior (seriously, the number of times Google Drive “finishes” an upload but leaves half the files in limbo—oh the joy).
But here’s a slightly different angle: if you’re in it for the “one and done, never look back” upload spree, don’t sleep on old-school FTP-to-Drive bridges. Some cloud file managers like MultCloud or Rclone can connect FTP servers or even your machine DIRECTLY to Google Drive with parallel uploads—no browser tab-staring required, and you get logs of what actually finished, unlike the Drive status bar, which is about as trustworthy as a fake progress bar from a 90s video game.
Still, keep in mind that with any big transfer, uploads can get throttled HARD depending on bandwidth and Google’s mysterious resource quirks. The official desktop sync eats space and, in my experience, just loves spawning duplicate files if you sneeze the wrong way (so yeah, I side-eye that too). Zipping is classic but if you care about individual file timestamps, it can get messy upon extracting in Drive. And with CloudMounter, you really get the smoothest experience, and it’s hands-down more reliable than Google’s apps for huge folder dumps, especially for folks who shuffle between projects or share their devices.
One random hack I rarely see mentioned: If you’re regularly dumping new stuff, create a “To Upload” staging folder and automate the transfer via command line tools (if you’re semi-techy). Automator on Mac or even scheduled scripts on Windows + CloudMounter = near hands-off upload process.
TL;DR for the skimmers: Browser = meh for huge jobs, desktop sync = risky with storage, CloudMounter = sweet spot for seamless big uploads, zip when you must but double-check on extraction, and consider automation if this is a recurring torture session. If Google Drive still acts up, it’s not you—it just wants to keep your uploads interesting.