Preview of the Attachment from emails

When you send an attachment to Airtable via the API (such as when you are using Make’s Airtable automations & integrations), you need to give Airtable’s attachment field a URL of a publicly-accessible file.

So you might need to have Make upload your files to a cloud storage space first, so you can grab a public link from the cloud storage space to send to Airtable.

Also, working with multiple attachments can be tricky, so I show how to work with multiple attachments using Make in this Airtable podcast episode.

That's so interesting!  It looks like they successfully uploaded but the previews aren't loading.  Maybe it's something to do with the uploaded files not having a proper file extension?

Are you able to actually view the files via the attachment viewer in Airtable?  Could you provide screenshots of your Make set up?

As I mentioned above, this happens when the files aren’t located at a publicly accessible URL when sending to Airtable.  

Hi Scott 🙂

I watched the video you recomended (a couple of ties until I understood :)), it helped me a lot!

I have already made a connection through Make with Dropbox to upload the files, I do not think there is a problem.

However, my attachments are still not appearing as I would like them...

Maybe the problem is (see the picture bellow), the 'source' URL for the Iterator? I am really stucked, and spent a lot of times resolving this one and only problem.

https://eu2.make.com/290174/scenarios/666810/edit

Regards, Imelda

I’m glad the video helped you!

You’ll need to make sure that the URL for the image is (1) publicly accessible and (2) that it’s a link to the actual file itself, not a Dropbox wrapper page that encloses the image. 

If the image is already publicly accessible, then you’re probably linking to the Dropbox wrapper page, not the image itself. You need to give the file path to the actual image itself, not Dropbox’s wrapper page.

Check out Make’s documentation on this at the bottom of this page:
https://www.make.com/en/help/app/dropbox?pc=scottworld

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld  

HI 🙂

Here are the screenshots:

Like I mentioned above, you are not using the proper URL. Your URL doesn't lead to any files — your URL leads to a Dropbox web page wrapper surrounding the image, which is not a file. Check out the Make's documentation at the bottom of this page for how to solve this: https://www.make.com/en/help/app/dropbox?pc=scottworld

Thanks! That's an interesting setup.  Is that Text Parser parsing the download URLs from dropbox into a format the iterator can deal with or something?  The last time I tried using the "Upload a File" action for dropbox it only ever grabbed the first attachment in the email, so I have no idea how your set up's working hah.  It was Gmail though, so maybe there was a difference there

For what it's worth, I have a scenario that works with Gmail that grabs the attachment, uploads it into dropbox, and then uses the download URL to upload it into Airtable successfully, and the preview shows up fine, so on a technical level it's totally doable I guess. 

I think if I had multiple attachments I'd put the iterator right after the watch email action and then run the actions on each attachment, i.e. upload each attachment, create the share link, and then use the aggregator on all the share links, then have the Airtable create record action after

Some questions:
Are you able to actually view the files via the attachment viewer in Airtable?
Could I also confirm whether you can view the file previews on Dropbox?
Have you considered just using Zapier for this instead?  I think you wouldn't need to do all this uploading into Dropbox etc stuff, Zapier just creates the URL for you automatically so it'd probably just be a two step Zap:
1. New email received via Outlook
2. Create record in Airtable

Personally, I would never recommend Zapier. Make is INFINITELY more powerful & customizable than Zapier, yet it is SIGNIFICANTLY CHEAPER than Zapier.

I wrote an entire post here comparing Make vs. Zapier.

In any case, I already identified the problem in my 2 posts above, and already gave the solution in my 2 posts above.

p.s. If anybody reading this thread needs help from an expert Airtable consultant to help with any problems like this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Scott, thank You! I read your recomendation, studied. It was really the problem what you pointed out, my URL was not 'hitting' the right way. Nevertheless, for a total beginner like I am, Make is a bit tricky. You have to have some 'coding' knowledge to solve a bit difficult problems.

The point is, I managed! I do not give up easy, and since I was determined to solve this problem, I took the time and 'learn' the process.

I can see my attachments. Well, basically not all of them... That would be my next question. In the original email there are more than one attachments, but in Airtable, appears only one. How can I solve it?

Best regards, Imelda

Hi! My first trying was Zapier, and then Scott recommended me the Make. It appears that the Make has really more powerful tools, but for me is not so simple to use. But since we are all here to learn, it is a process 🙂

The problem was indeed that my URL was not pointing in the right way. I read the documentation what Scott linked, and I could solve that problem.

Regards, Imelda