Uploading Images in an Airtable from desktop application

[Vineet]

I want to be able to built a utility (that can work on Windows as well as MAC system), that we can use to upload multiple images in a table. The structure of the table is simple:

----------------------------
| Image Name | Thumbnail   |
-------------|-------------|
| Image01    | Image01.jpg |
| Image02    | Image02.jpg |
| Image03    | Image03.jpg |
----------------------------

The “Image Name” is simple “Single line of text” field and “Thumbnail” is an “Attachment” field.
I searched all over the internet, but couldn’t find a way to do that. Services like integromat can be used to insert images from cloud, but I want to be able to upload images kept on local computer.

Any help would be appreciated to get me started. I am fairly experienced in VBA automation or Python, but not in using API. So that will be a learning curve, but I am willing to learn.

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

In order to create an attachment in Airtable using code, the file must be hosted at a publicly accessible url. Scripting also cannot access the local file system without user intervention for each and every file.

On the other hand, you can upload multiple files at once using the Gallery view without scripting.

[Vineet]

Thanks kuovonne for the reply!
Yes, Grid view provides an awesome way to upload the images. So that is indeed a backup. But I still wanted to built a frontend kind of application (be it desktop or browser based), that can take a folder as an input and upload it similar to grid view upload feature.

I just explored the airtable js (GitHub - Airtable/airtable.js: Airtable javascript client) and I think it’s possible to built the frontend using that. I will keep on exploring. Thanks.

[kuovonne]

If you want to build an app outside of Airtable that interacts with Airtable using the REST API, this is quite possible. Your app will still need to move the files from the local file system to a publicly accessible url before ultimately creating the attachment.

[Vineet]

I have figured dropping images on gallery view is the optimal solution as of now. Since it is a secure way to upload files while also giving a nice view of how many records are going to be created.

Thanks for the replies.