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Hey Airtable community -
I’ve got a form we intend to use daily to catalog pictures of our daily jobs.

The form I’ve made is linked to our “jobs in progress” page and the idea is then that we open the form “upload attachment”, “from camera”, and then snap a quick photo from someones, boss, employee, whoever’s phone. Then it should upload the pic and update the primary record.

I’ve got it all working as intended, but the problem is the default picture size on everyones phone is 2 to 3 MB or more, and then we end up having to wait over a minute to upload different pics / angles of the job, when it should really be much faster.

These pics are primarily just for liability, colour reference and potentially some social media so they don’t need to be high resolution.

I was thinking maybe find a super old phone with smaller pics but seems like a wonky solution, wondering if there’s anything more elegant to speed it all up.

Any upload from a mobile device—to Airtable or any other server—can only go as fast as the connection that device is using. There’s nothing that can be done on Airtable’s end to optimize the process. The upload speed can only improve by using a faster connection and/or smaller images.


Hmm… I’ve never had a problem with speed when uploading photos using Airtable’s forms. It always goes very fast for me, so you may want to check your phone’s Internet connection speeds.

However, you can always try Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable and see if you get better speeds from uploading photos using a Fillout form.

Even better, Fillout offers hundreds of other advanced features for Airtable, such as the ability to update records with a form, so you could upload your photos directly to the primary record where you want to see those photos.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld