Automation to Slack with Photos

[Daniel_Henning]

Hello, I’m trying to find the best way to have reports with attachments (photos) automatically post to our team Slack channel upon submission. Basically, I have set up a form that my team can complete that allows for an attachment (photo) upload. After submission I have the automations set up to post to Slack. Everything works except the image will normally have “file not found.” I have the URL set to forward to Slack.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[Nate_Bartlett]

I would like to know how to implement this functionality as well.

[Core_Team]

Anyone find a solution for this yet? I also need to send an automated slack message from airtable to slack with an attachment.

[ScottWorld]

As far as I know, Airtable doesn’t natively support Slack’s “Upload File” API request, which is what you need to send a message to Slack with a file attached to it.

Technically speaking, when you use Slack’s API, you are actually “uploading the file” first, and then you are optionally attaching an initial message that goes along with that file upload.

If you know how to write code, you can accomplish this feat by either:

1. Writing your own JavaScript script to accomplish this, or
2. Use the excellent DataFetcher.com extension.

Otherwise, if you want to do this in a no-code way that doesn’t require any knowledge of writing code, you can do this very easily with Make, which has full support for Airtable & Slack.

Below is a screenshot example of how easily you could setup this scenario in Make.

1. Note that your first Airtable module might be different than mine, because I just used that module for the purposes of my own internal testing.
2. Note that the 2nd module (“Get A File”) is required because you need to download the attachment from Airtable first, and then re-upload it as an actual file to Slack.
3. You can insert your optional initial message within the “Upload a File” module.

[Ambroise_Dhenai]

With how annoying that was to setup (yet another external workflow), I did somewhat of a hack to display the picture only using an Airtable automation.

I had the chance of having a video of the person I wanted to display the picture of, using the link to that video and the "Unfurl url", it automatically displays a preview of the video, which includes the picture of the person.
Much simpler, but definitely not possible in every case - thought I'd share 😉