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New Data Type: Image URL

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Mike_Eovino
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Iโ€™d love to see a new data type that takes the URL of an image file and renders the image rather than just displaying the URL as a link. I would think that this would save you some storage space as well by letting us link to hosted files rather than pulling them in as attachments.

52 Comments
David_Schaub-Jo
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Yes, I would also love this feature, for instance, feeding from google sheets, via Zapier, a bunch of links that then display as thumbnails. Does not seem to happen right now.

Adam_Thede
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I want to add my vote for this feature as well. Would be incredibly useful for my organization.

Johnny_Knox
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

+1 Agree. This feature would be really useful. I can export user URL thumbnail from another service, but canโ€™t actually see the pics.

Mark_Macas
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

+1 Iโ€™m also voting for this feature request. Another idea on how to implement this is by introducing a new IMAGE function. Something like Google Sheetโ€™s IMAGE function. You pass the URL on this function and then it displays the image on the cell of Google Sheet.

Emmanuel_Watrin
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

+1 for this feature. Not being able to (automatically) display images from URLs is obviously a huge pain for everyone here!

David_Washburn
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

+1 for this. AirTable is great but it has incredibly limited support for sheets with pictures or images. I had to learn how to be an Excel VBS Rocket Scientist just to export images in a logical way that I could import into AirTable since CSV doesnโ€™t support images.

C_KK
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

hi David, how did you do it? i want to do the same thing too!

David_Washburn
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Unfortunately the process didnโ€™t quite work like I had anticipated. It was an incredibly obnoxious process, and it may work better for you. Given the complexity of my situation it did not work. These are the steps I had to go through since AirTable doesnโ€™t inherently support image upload with XSLX files.

  1. Run script that saves all Excel images and names the file based on the row itโ€™s in (example 1.png, 12.png, 55.png etc). The script is on Stack overflow, Iโ€™ll paste it in here when I can. Iโ€™m having trouble logging in to my account right now.

  2. Save original Excel file as CSV

  3. Upload original Excel file.

  4. Manually upload images 1 by 1 into the column they are named after.

OR, if you are ok with linked images rather than having the image thumbnail appear on your sheet, you can bulk upload all the images into a new gallery view and use a linked column to manually link each image to their associated row. Itโ€™s mostly all manual.

It sucks.

Vincent_Tang
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

David did you have the script for this?

Image upload is such a pain in air table, I have a ton of image URL assets that Iโ€™d like to port in but canโ€™tโ€ฆ

I would really like the image URL preview link so I can just use my own file attachments instead

The only thing I could possibly think of for uploading images into Airtable is the following workflow:

  1. Open up Airtable spreadsheet
  2. Open up Regular spreadsheet with URL images to port in
  3. Run a Mouse / Keyboard automation macro that grabs each item one by one, puts it over to the airtable link, checks PIXELS for upload successes, and then does each image one by one.

This would assume my airtable spreadsheet and regularspreadsheet have a 1:1 relationship, or that I could use a CTRL+F search for the same primary keys each one shares to grab the image URL

I canโ€™t think of a better way to do this. Not even sure if this would even work correctly either

I would like to see what your script looks like though on SO

EDIT

for anyone reading this I ended up making a autohotkey macro on this thread:

Bruno_Costa
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

+1 for this feature! Iโ€™m so used to =IMAGE(โ€œURLโ€) on regular spreadsheets.