There is no way to use a formula to get a valid URL from an attachment field.
That is outdated information from many years ago, but unfortunately, this community’s search engine returns the oldest posts first in the search results, so everybody sees outdated information first instead of current information.
You would either need to use Airtable’s automations to get the expiring URL, or you would need to use an API automation tool like Make’s advanced automations & integrations to get the expiring URL.
However, the expiring URL will stop working 2 hours after it is viewed for the first time, so that is not a valid option for embedding into emails.
Your best bet is to publicly host your images on a cloud drive somewhere, such as Google Drive.
Then, use the public URL of your publicly hosted image to use in the body of your email.
If you need to automate this process of moving your attachments from Airtable to a cloud drive, you can do it using Make.
You can check out my post here on how to move attachments from Airtable to Google Drive, and those instructions would really be the same for any cloud drive service.
You can also send your automated emails from Make as well.
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.
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 @Michael-Zimmer,
For your specific use case, are attachments static or dynamic? Meaning, will you need to attach different images depending on the record?
Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation
YouTube Channel
That’s a great question from @Mike_AutomaticN, because if you need to attach different images depending on the record, you could just insert the attachment field itself in the “attachments section” of the email action. Not sure if it would work in the body, but it might.
- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant
Appreciate the update and clarity on this. Thought I could give it a crack natively in Airtable. I’ll mess around with it as an attachment.
Hm, even if you mange to figure out how to display it, chances are by the time your user opens the email the URL’s expired and the image won’t load. Could you talk more about your business case?
If you’re okay with adding the file as an attachment to the email instead of displaying it inline that’d be easiest, if not you’re going to need to create a workflow where you host the image somewhere, get that URL, and then send the email out. You can check out Cloudinary for that, they let you upload an image via a pretty simple API call, and so the workflow would be:
- Automation triggered
- Grabs the attachments and uploads them to Cloudinary via a Run a Script action
- Cloudinary returns image URLs
- Use the Cloudinary URLs in your email
Free plan’s pretty generous and should be able to cover you unless you’re doing a ton of image hosting every month
