Native URL to Attachment

[Florian_Verdon2]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to share a quick tip I use.
I often see people use Zapier or miniExtensions to do this basic operation so it may be easier to do this way.

I am using the Automation feature of Airtable to trigger when the record has a “pending URL” (that should be processed).

When triggered, Airtable let’s you set the Attachment field type with an “URL” value and will automatically convert it. (tested for images and PDFs)

Demo base available here

Florian

[Benjamin_Watrou]

Looks like a simple setting change downloaded the images. Since it was an attachment field, once I increased the row height from the smallest size (default), the images populated :laughing: .
Thanks for following up Florian! I’ll keep you in mind moving forward.

[Benjamin_Watrou]

Airtable support confirmed issues with GDrive files: “I did some more digging internally and there is an existing issue with uploading Google Drive URLs to an attachment field that can cause intermittent failures. That might have been what you encountered here (since the row height should not affect this behavior at all)”

[Max_Berger]

Hi Florian,
First of all I’m completely new to airtable. I’ve a table with 10k public image urls, which I like to convert to attachments, so I can deploy the vision app on these images.

I opened your Demo link and replicated the base. However, can’t see the pending URL’s table anywhere.

Although I’ve already upgraded my plan airtable is still keeping me in the trial mode. Maybe that’s why I can’t see the the table? Also, if I create a trigger the “run a script” optin is simply greyed out.

Would love to hear what I can do differently.
Thanks,
Max

[Florian_Verdon2]

Hello @Max_Berger,

You don’t really need the Pending URLs table, any table can handle this, you just have to configure the automation to run on your table.

About the “Run script” option disabled, I would recommend to try logging out and logging in again, just to see if it solves the problem.

Did you take the “PRO” plan ? (not PLUS, PLUS is just a limit increase compared to FREE)

Florian

[Max_Berger]

Hi @Florian_Verdonck thanks for your fast reply. I logged out and logged in again. Somehow I’m stuck in the trial. It says the pro version will start after the trial pro has ended. But I couldn’t find a way to cancel the trial and start with the real pro versio right away.

I guess I’ve to contact Airtable and ask them to charge me right away… Haha I’ll never had to bag a company to charge me.

Hopefully, it’s gong to work then. As far as I understand copying your base would also copy the necessary script or?
Thanks!
Max

[MatteoCossu]

Adding my two cents to this, there seems to be a slight lag between the permissions change in GDrive and its propagation. This means that Airtable might not immediately import them.

[MatteoCossu]

Also, for anyone who would like to use this with Dropbox, simply download the normal sharing link from Dropbox.

It’ll look like this:

dropbox.com

example.pdf

To get a direct download link, just replace the www.dropbox.com with dl.dropboxusercontent.com , which will give you a link like:

dl.dropboxusercontent.com

example.pdf

203.34 KB

[Hugh_Daly]

3DJ:

It’s surprising Airtable doesn’t already convert LABEL (URL) to attachments, even when it was originally an attachment converted to text. :thinking:

How did you get it to work? I, like many others in this chain, do not see any automations in the linked base.

[matt_stewart1]

@Florian_Verdon2... this is amazing, didn't realize how easy this was. However, for some reason sortable is converting my attachment to a ".ashx" file. If I click on url directly it downloads as SVG, but using the url in attachment field via automation attaches as an ".ashx". It appears normal, and when I download to computer I can rename to ".svg" and it will then open normal. However it requires additional operations. Any thoughts on how to stop it from changing to .ashx?