Function (button) to download all Google Drive attachments

You could easily build something like this by using Make’s Google Drive integrations and Make’s ZIP archive integrations.

You could copy all the files into a new Google Drive folder, then zip up the folder for the user to download.

You could trigger the automation from a button in Airtable that triggers a Make webhook, and then use a custom webhook response to give the users the download link of the finished .zip file. (Or just put the download link in a field in Airtable.)

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 many different ways that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable,

But in your case, you may want to instantly trigger a Make automation by having a button or URL link in Airtable trigger a custom webhook, so you can display a custom webhook response onscreen to the user.

I 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. And in this video, I show how to use custom webhooks.

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

I have the same limitation. Airtable  attachment field is fine for storing and viewing files, but once you want to pick a bunch of attachments and get them as one ZIP, things get a lot less straightforward.

One workaround is to use an automation or script to collect the attachment URLs for the selected records, download them & build the ZIP and the difficult part is handling the Google Drive links, since those are different from Airtable-hosted attachments and often need their own download logic.

If you manage to get Omni to produce a working button for this, I’d be interested in seeing how you did it. A simple “select records → download attachments” action would be useful.

I’d recommend using Make (formerly Integromat) do accomplish this. You could add a checkbox field to indicate which records should be included in the download. Also, you’ll need a field to isolate the file ID for the photo. If you use an interface button to trigger an automation that triggers a webhook, you can set up a Make scenario to download the files and email them to the requesting user.

Thank you ​@ScottWorld. I had not thought about being able to trigger Make with a button from Airtable. I’m out of automations in Airtable so this could work well for this need.

I agree ​@danielm that a simple “select records → download attachments” action would be very welcome. If I can trick Omni into doing this, I’ll update here.

Thanks ​@e2laurel, I’ll look into the button → Make method, sounds good.

That would be great. I’m interested to see if Omni can get it working too. If you crack it, please post the details here. I’d definitely like to give the same approach a try.

I didn’t find any easy way to do this within Airtable either and don’t really feel comfortable scripting this myself. Found a Chrome extension though that solved it for me - it downloads all attachments in a column, you can pick how files are named and didn’t require any API key to set up. Sharing here since it helped me save a lot of time!