Importing a url photo as an attachment on import.

[JeffJohnVol]

Hi. I'm new to airtable, but I have a background as an ERP developer. I'm doing baby steps on my application to see if I can get airtable to help me manage a member-run makerspace. Currently I do it with excel and google forms. Hopefully this is something easy to do with an automation, but I'm very green at present.

I have google sheet that gets filled in each time a person fills out a google form, including their photo that is stored as a url to a google doc folder.  When I import the data from this google sheet, I can assign it as a url, but is there a way with an automation to take the URL and add it to the record as an attachment?  The end result is that I want to be able to send out a form to the board members to approve, along with the photo of the applicant, if they submit one. Currently I can do this in google forms, notifying the board via an email, but this is the first step of converting our system to airtable.

Thanks in advance.

Jeff

[Mike_AutomaticN]

Hey!

If I get it right, you are trying to get the attachment out the URL. Right?

If that is the case it is really simple. Please check this similar post. 

I hope that solves your issue!

[JeffJohnVol]

Thanks Mike, I'll give that a shot.  🙂

[Mike_AutomaticN]

Sure! If it does not solve the issue, please let me know and we’ll figure it out!

[ScottWorld]

@JeffJohnVol 

Your best bet is to either use Airtable’s native forms, or to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable. Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of advanced form features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer. Fillout also offers built-in automations for their forms, just like Airtable does.

However, if you’d like to stick with Google Forms, then you can automate the process of getting those form submissions (with photos) into Airtable by using Make’s Google Forms integrations and Make’s Airtable integrations.

Hope this helps!

— ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

[TheTimeSavingCo · Accepted solution]

Hmm, so your workflow would be:
1. User fills out Google Form
2. New row gets created in Google Sheets
3. Automation triggers and creates a new record in Airtable with the same data from Google Sheets
  a. The image should be added to Airtable as an attachment
4. Automation triggers and sends out a form to the board members with the details from that form, along with the photo of the applicant

Is that right?

I think the tricky bit might be step 4, specifically, if the photo is within the form itself that might be challenging and I can't think of a way to do that with Airtable forms.  You should be able to do that with Fillout though I think?

If you're okay with sending out a link to a form to the board members and the photo as an attachment within that email, that should be easy enough to do

---
To get the data automatically imported when the Google Form's submitted, you could use the trigger "When a row is created" and create a new record in Airtable automatically with all that form's data:

You could then have a formula field that converts the Google Drive share link to a downloadable link, which you would use in an "Update record" step where you paste that URL value into an attachment field.  I've set that up here for you to check out.

"https://drive.google.com?export=download&id=" &
SUBSTITUTE(
  SUBSTITUTE(
    Name,
    "https://drive.google.com/file/d/",
    ""
  ),
  "/view?usp=sharing",
  ""
)

(The formula should work, but maybe the share links you're generating are slightly different from mine.  Lemme know if you hit any issues and I'll sort it)

You could then attach that file in your email that includes the form to your board members via an automation

===
If you're able to swap over the workflow to have them submit an Airtable form instead that'd cut out the need for the formula field and attachment automation entirely.  I understand that there might be business reasons why you can't do a wholesale switch over though.  Assuming one of those reasons is that people still want to use Google Sheets during this transition period, what if you made people submit the Airtable form, and then used an automation to push that data into your Google Sheet?  

[JeffJohnVol]

Thanks Mike, I tried that post, but I think it may be out of date (from 2021) as the sample base and image didn't really explain it to get it to work for me.  I may just go with a native airtable form, then I'd just have to worry about converting the old data.

[JeffJohnVol]

Thanks Scott, I agree, using the native form is probably the smarter route for me.  However, I'll have to deal with the older data to convert over, but for the photos I can spend an hour worst case dragging/dropping onto the imported csv. 

Thanks for the reference to fillout.  I'll check that out. 🙂

Jeff

[ScottWorld]

@JeffJohnVol 

I believe that you can quickly bring in all of the old photos by going back in time and using Make’s “Choose Where To Start” option (and you would choose an old form to start with), but if you’ve never used Make before, there is quite a learning curve so it could take you a few hours to figure out how to set this up. Make’s technical support is very good — they might be able to talk you through the process. 

[JeffJohnVol]

Adam, thanks for the detailed reply.  Yes, you nailed it in terms of what I'm trying to do. I'm going to try that when I get time, but I think for simplicity's sake I'm going to go the native form route to try to remove that older process.  I'll need to convert the old applications at some point, but I can import those data and try to use the formula you suggested. 🙂  Of course, now going the new method brings up a host of other questions, but I'll try to see what I can do initially and will start a new thread if I have difficulty.  Thanks. 🙂