Need more space for attachments - multiple bases or up-buy Airtable plan?
Hi,
We run a photo studio CRM with Airtable, and would like to start storing customer end product images there. This would mean some 20-30 images at 2-3 mega each and hundreds of customers annually. We’re on the Team plan so have 20 gigs limitation per base for attachments, so space would end quite soon.
The for me easy and obvious solution was to write to Airtable sales to ask if one could just pay for more storage, since we don’t need the Business plan additional features (and eventually that would also hit storage limitations), but they don’t seem to be responding.
I know the storage limit is per base so I guess one could somehow create more bases just for adding attachment storage, but I don’t see how to do that. And it seems this would create problems when we need the second, the the third “extra” base.
Hence my question here, what would your experiences be with this?
Any best practices here?
Rgds,
Björn
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Unfortunately, Airtable will not let you pay for more of anything — you can’t pay for more attachment storage space, more automations, more records, etc.
Airtable will only allow you to upgrade to a higher plan, so your best short-term plan is to upgrade to Business (or Enterprise, if you can afford it).
However, if you feel like you’re going to exceed the attachment limits on those pricing plans as well, then you would need to take a different approach for long-term success.
Dividing up your active data amongst multiple bases is not usually recommended in Airtable, unless: (a) you’re doing it purely for security purposes, or (b) you’re making annual “archive bases” where you archive old records that you won’t be looking at very frequently.
The reason for this is because you will lose many of Airtable’s features once your base splits up into multiple bases.
Also, another problem that you’re not yet aware of is that Airtable doesn’t want people using Airtable as a CDN or a cloud storage drive, so Airtable uses “expiring URL links” for accessing your attachments from outside of Airtable.
What this means is that you can’t reference or embed your Airtable attachments within other media (e.g. embedded in emails, embedded in newsletters, embedded in Wordpress posts, embedded on websites unless you’re using an Airtable-branded view or interface).
This is because attachment URLs will expire 2 hours after accessing them for the first time. (External portal apps — such as Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Glide, and Pory — typically workaround this limitation by reloading the attachment fields on demand, but I’m not 100% sure about what other tricks they might use.)
So your best long-term solution would probably be to host your attachments with a cloud storage provider such as Google Drive or Cloudinary, and then reference those images by URL within Airtable.
Airtable’s interface pages even let you display external URLs as images within your interfaces, so it could potentially “feel like” those attachments are living within Airtable.
I typically recommend using Make’s advanced automations & integrations to automatically migrate attachments from Airtable to a cloud storage provider, and then automatically bringing the links back into Airtable.
Exactly as Scott mentioned above, I would suggest you build an integration with Google Drive using any third party automation tool such as Zapier, Make, or N8N (I personally would recommend N8N, but you can read more about the difference between each of them here).
Basic workflow you want to achieve: 1. Trigger (When a record matches conditions -e.g. Attachment field is not empty, or a button is clicked etc) 2. Get Attachments from Attachment field on specific Airtable record(s). 3. Push them to a specific folder on Google Drive 4. Update the Airtable Record(s) with the specific google drive link for the stored attachment.
Here’s a very simple screenshot of how this sort of an automation could be setup in Make.
Note that this is just a very simple scenario. This doesn’t take into account multiple attachments per record, which would require you to use Make’s iterator module to iterate through the attachments.
Plus, if you have multiple attachments per record, then you would probably want to create a new linked table in Airtable to handle all the attachment URLs — one record for each URL. So that final “update record” step would end up being a “create record” step.
But this screenshot can be a good starting point for something very simple.
