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Hello, Airtable friends!

 

I have a table that has several file attachment columns and many rows. One of my workflows is go through the table and download all attachments for certain rows. It’s been a bit time-consuming to go download the files one by one, so I’m wondering if there’s a way to automate it.

Does anyone know of an extension that lets you download all files attached to a given record? (My team and I are flexible on whether that’s a ZIP file, multiple downloads, etc.)  If not, does it seem feasible to write a custom block for that?

 

Would greatly appreciate any perspectives on this!

​@robert_wp 

There are several different extensions in the Airtable Marketplace that will allow you to bulk download your attachments from Airtable onto your local computer.

If you’d like to bulk upload your attachments to a cloud storage space (such as Google Drive), you can automate that entire process using Make's automations and integrations. The automation could also .zip the files if you want.

Check out my post here for bulk archiving attachments from Airtable to Google Drive.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make. This might be helpful for you, because attachment fields are arrays.

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

Hi ​@ScottWorld ,

Thank you for the quick response, I appreciate it!

I’d like to download files for just one record at a time. Based on your experience archiving files, is that something that seems feasible to you, or there’s an existing solution for? Would greatly appreciate any pointers.

​@robert_wp 

Yes, either of the methods that I outlined above will work for either ONE RECORD or MULTIPLE RECORDS.

However, going down the Make.com route will probably be a better long-term solution for you, because your attachments are spread out across multiple attachment fields, and you only want to trigger one record on demand.

With the Airtable extensions, they expect all of your attachments to be in a single attachment field, and it might be slightly more tedious on your end to get it down to just one record, because you would need to always update the filter on a special view to show just the one record that you want to download.

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

Hey ​@robert_wp!

As you explore Make.com I would also suggest you take a look at n8n.io. No affiliation whatsoever lol. I describe some of the differences between these softwares here. 
 

Feel free to reach out if you need any help setting this up.  I’d be happy to help out. 
 

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 

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