Images not processing or showing uploaded from airtable form

Hi @Patrick_Hill,

Welcome to Airtable Community ! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:

That seems odd, I have several forms with several attachments and they are working fine. I can take a look if you want.

BR,
Mo

Checking to see if your issue is similar to this one:

This is a relatively known issue in Airtable - read this thread.

sure, happy to work on a solution but I have confirmed it is an image processing error by airtable.

If it is a known issue why is Airtable not fixing it??
Very disappointing.

To be clear, my comment referenced another “known issue” that other Airtable users had experienced concerning attachment operations and to point out that there are a number of different types of possible issues.

Relatively speaking, Airtable is aware of at least the one I reported on behalf of more than one client and as you may have noticed in this forum, there are a variety of other issues and workarounds suggested.

The experience you are seeing is not identical to some of the others, and your specific case is not fully documented here. For example…

This is not enough data to state what the true cause is - were these images selected and uploaded when the user of the form was in a separate security context with the origin of the image? This matters greatly if the image is being uploaded by value or by reference. Other factors that play into the reliability of image attachments are image type, size, etc. Examples provide the best evidence for failure.

Because of all these variables, I recommend you file a support ticket with lots of details that prove the system is failing. You might actually discover that you’re not experiencing a bug at all.

We are having 100 submissions daily on an AirTable form. They happen by iPad, iPhone and generally in the home. It is not a security context or a file issue. It is definately a random image processing issue with AirTable. It happens approximately 15% of the time. We have to pay someone to sit there and monitor.

I have sent many emails to support@airtable.com but they have been ignored.

Yep. That metric right there is pretty much our experience as well. We are seeing 21% of all API uploads of PDF documents that are publicly-hosted fail to “stick”.

For about a week now, 10% or more of the images uploaded to our Airtable forms (not API) are not showing up in preview like Patrick describes.

Mo,
Are you not having this issue?

I have had a response by the AirTable team, they say it is a known issue for about a week now and is an issue with the image processing component.

They said…

We’re currently investigating some known issues around attachment thumbnails and previews not displaying correctly that began last week as a result of some issues with our file processor, Filestack.

I have emails dated early January and a support ticket back to Dec 19. This is a deeply documented and a fully reproducible issue for about 15 weeks -

Hey Bill, we have been tracking the images as working now.for about 24 hours. Looks like they might have fixed the issue. We will monitor for a week before we stop manually releasing docs.

For the last week, all the image uploading we do in Airtable seems to be working as expected again.

I tried the miniExtensions, Bulk Image Compression on Airtable and had around 10% failure rate of images not processed and no preview. I am guessing this is related to the the ongoing issue @Bill.French has been facing with the API.

I’ll review our clients’ integration metrics to see if this is universal.

Yes - our clients are seeing what appears to be 100% PDF document attachment reliability now.

This is an old thread, but this is still an issue, and for some reason, I have no ability to create a new thread or post. We have forms where our employees in the field submit receipts and photos; many of the images are just broken and unavailable. We have built an entire application around this functionality that is now unreliable. The worst part is that we use some of the images automatically in customer-facing reports. 

Maybe that isn't the worst part, though. Come to think of it, the worst part is that we have had this issue off and on for the several years we have been using Airtable. On an earlier occasion, Airtable support pointed the finger at Box.com as the ability to include attachments was provided by this other party. Now, despite being an Enterprise subscriber with 10+ users we cannot even get a response from support on the issue. 

I really would like to resolve this but I actually have no confidence in this product and am looking for solutions elsewhere.