Length of URLs in csv files

[rz1]

Does anyone know what the character limit is for the length of URLs of photo images exported in CSV files? Is there a way to limit the URL size/length?

[kuovonne]

Do you have an attachment field with photos, and you are trying to export the URLs of the attachments? If so, you get expiring URLs and have no control over the length. You get what you get.

Or do you have a URL field type?  Airtable has not published the character limit for URL fields, but it is probably similar to the 100,000 character limit of text fields.

What is your goal in limiting the length of a url? Do you need the url to remain functional?

[rz1]

It is an attachment field with photos.  The table is exported into a CSV file and the URLs are the ones created by that process.  The question was posed to me by the organization that is taking that file and writing code to upload it and that includes accessing the images and loading them.  They are concerned that their code has a limit of 200 characters for the URL and if they need to expand it, what should they expand it to?  Alternatively, if there is a setting or a way to limit the URL length, we could manage it that way.

[ScottWorld]

You cannot control the length of the URL, but those URLs are only valid for 2 hours after accessing them externally, so those URLs won’t last you very long anyways.

The ideal solution would be to either write your own custom JavaScript scripts or use a no-code tool like Make (which doesn’t require any programming code) to grab the files from Airtable, automatically upload them to a permanent storage location (such as Cloudinary or Google Drive), and then grab the new URL from there.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld