Why doesn’t emby support cloud storage?

[Kyrunner 86]

I would love to point Emby to my google drive and have all my media there would save a lot of HDD space in my nas. 

[rodainas 191]

You can use rclone for that or any similar application.

[Carlo 4561]

Numerous ways to accomplish this but rclone is a proven winner.
Rclone can be setup to mount as a drive letter or joined to an existing folder on your computer.  You just make sure Emby has permission to access the new "local drive" and setup the path in Emby Server as library.

Scanning will be slow compared to having the files local because Emby needs to read the files the first time accessed to gather the meta-data.  So initial scan time will depend on the size and media types of your current cloud library.

There is an alternate way that skips the initial scan using STRM files. https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44001159147-strm-files

In a nut shell you create a folder structure just like if the media were local except you use a text file with an strm extension instead of the media.  The text file has one line inside it which is just a URL to the download location of the media.  There are scripts available to generate these folders/files automatically for you.

When Emby encounters an STRM file during scanning it will not pull down the file and will skip the steps to pull the meta-data from the file itself (like codecs, stream types, etc).  On initial playback of the media the first time Emby reads this info adjusts on the fly and of course save this meta-data so it's available going forward.

The major advantage to this method is that you can have a local folder holding the graphics, NFO file and optional thumbnails while keep the actual media in the cloud.  That's a great compromise of storage space and functionality.