Lookup fields in other tables don’t count towards your base’s total storage limit

Are you asking about having multiple bases and syncing them though?  Sorry, a bit confused by your post!

Note that when you delete files, they can still be in a trash and/or record revision history. As long as they still able to be restored, they are counted.

Sorry for the confusion! 

It’s 1 base. I have a table with photos and other tables that “lookup” to those images. 

Thanks!

How can I permanently delete them?

It’s in the History/Revision menu at the Data layer, click on Trash and then you can empty it. Attached a screenshot for clarity. 

Hey ​@ARiios!

Maybe as suggestion, you might want to explore building an integration with Google Drives. So rather than keeping the actual file on Airtable you could keep the Google Drive file url.
To make user experience smooth, you could:

1. Upload image to Airtable as I guess you are currently doing 
2. Automation will send file to Google Drive
3. Automation will clear the Attachment field on Airtable
4. Automation will update the airtable record with the Google Drive url.

For building such integration you will probably want to check out Zapier, Make or n8n (I would personally suggest a self-hosted instance of n8n). For more info on differences between these softwares you can check out this article I wrote.

Hope this helps!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

You can use script to evaluate attachment size per table. But since it adds file sizes in Attachment fields, it doesn’t count deleted files in trash
 

//Define functions:
const inMb=bytes=>bytes? `${Math.round(bytes/2**20)} Mb`:''
const flds=table=>table.fields.filter(fld=>fld.type.includes('Attach'));
const sum=arr=>!arr? null:{size:arr.filter(n=>n).map(x=>x.size).reduce((x,y)=>x+y,0)}
const count=async tbl=>await tbl.selectRecordsAsync({fields:flds(tbl)}).then(q=>
sum(flds(tbl).flatMap(fl=>q.records.map(x=>x.getCellValue(fl)).map(sum))));

//Start count, all tables * all attach fields * all records * all docs in cell
const ts=await Promise.all(base.tables.map(count))
const total=ts.map((el,ix)=>[base.tables[ix].name,inMb(el.size)]).filter(t=>t[1])
console.log(Object.fromEntries([...total,['TOTAL: ',inMb(sum(ts)?.size)]]))

As ​@Mike_AutomaticN mentioned above, your best bet for this is to automatically offload your attachments to Google Drive, and then automatically keep the link to the Google Drive attachments within Airtable.

Even better, you can view previews of your Google Drive attachments in Airtable by using Airtable’s URL Preview extension in the data layer or the new URL field image preview in the interface layer.

In my opinion, the best way to automate all of this would be to use Make.

Check out the screenshot below to see one way that you could set up this automation in Make.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld