Using SendGrid to send photos in email

Hey Will,

It’s possible to send photos from an attachment field in the Sendgrid block as long as there’s just one photo uploaded per attachment cell. To do so, first add a formula field to pull the URL from the attachment field:

MID({attachment}, FIND('dl.airtable.com', {attachment}), LEN({attachment}) - FIND('dl.airtable.com', {attachment}))

Then, as long as your Sendgrid block is configured to Send as HTML,

you can reference the formula field to display the image:

<img src="{Attachment URL Formula}">

Does this help?

Yes - thank you so much!

Hi all - I’m trying this solution now but I’m just getting a broken image tile when I use the formula field and insert the HTML line you’ve written there. 
Does this still work for you? Trying to determine if this is user error. Thanks

No, unfortunately, the solution above was from 5 years ago, and will no longer work today.

If you’d like to use SendGrid to send emails with attachments, you would need to turn to an external automation tool such as Make’s advanced automations.

However, SendGrid is a difficult platform to work with. I would recommend either using MailerSend or MailGun.

MailerSend actually has an extension for Airtable, which seems to support attachments, but I haven’t personally tested that functionality.

But even if you decide to use MailerSend or MailGun, I highly would recommend just handling it all with Make, because you get much more power there & much more functionality.

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. You will want to know how to work with arrays, 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

Airtable updated the way the attachment URLs work and so we can’t use Airtable as a image host like that anymore I’m afraid.  That is to say, we can’t display images hosted on Airtable in an email body, but we can send them as attachments, does that make sense? 

That’s interesting - when sending them as attachments, would they still expire within a couple hours? I haven’t really seen much documentation about the attachment functionality - It might work for me  (I don’t need to display the image, I just need it to be included somehow) 

That is correct… if you attach them as actual attachments (and not just embedded as a URL reference in your emails), they will not expire.

However, as I mentioned above, the SendGrid extension does not support attachments unless you communicate with SendGrid through Make.

But — both the MailerSend extension and Airtable’s automations DO support attachments, so you could stay entirely within Airtable and send your emails that way!

Now Airtable’s automations do have limits on the number of recipients you can send to in a single day, so if you’re sending to tons of people, you’ll need to use one of the 3rd-party platforms.

I prefer MailGun and MailerSend over SendGrid, because they are much easier to work with  

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 

Nah, attachments aren’t related to the attachment URLs, so the expiry stuff doesn’t apply for them.  What’re you trying to do?  No worries if you’ve already figured everything out though

Ah I understand now after doing some research on automations. I think we’ve actually figured it out, but thank you for your help!