Short answer

That's right, in Google Drive managing the permissions of Google Drive files and folders works differently than other file managers do.

Explanation

Limitations

1. You can only transfer ownership of files and folders between accounts on the same domain, from mydomain.com to mydomain.com or from gmail.com to gmail.com yes you can, but you can't from mydomain.com to gmail.com or vice versa.

2. You can only transfer ownership of files in Google formats, you cannot transfer ownership of "uploaded files" such as images, videos, PDFs, etc.

It is worth mentioning that the files and folders in Google Drive could

1. have none, one or more parent folders

   • Yes, believe it or not, in Google Drive, it is possible for a file or folder to be left without a parent folder/drive. If you can't find a file, first see Find or recover a file .

2. have items with different sharing settings, so changes made in the parent folder might not be pushed to child files and folders

For G Suite accounts, the administrator can transfer files from one account to another.

Alternative solutions / workarounds

Files "uploaded"/synchronized

Although using consumer accounts, such as those with a gmail.com domain, it is not possible to transfer the uploaded/synchronized files, it is possible to copy them.

Cross-domain files and folders

In the case of Google format files and cross-domain folders, it "might" be possible to copy the files. The "could" instead of "may" is that the owner may have set one or more of their files to prevent them from being copied.

References

officers

end user help

• Transfer ownership of a file ,
• Stop sharing or limit or change sharing settings

G Suite Admin Help

• Transfer Drive files to a new owner

Self-referrals

• Rescue Orphaned Files and Folders from Google Drive

related threads

• How to loop through subfolders to transfer ownership of Google Drive folders and files to another user . This thread actually asks how to loop through subfolders.