One of the questions that comes up frequently is how to store attachments if you’ve reached the attachment limit for your workspace.
One quick fix would be to upgrade to the next higher pricing plan to get more attachment space.
However, if you are unable to move to a higher pricing plan, my personal favorite way of solving this problem is to use a combination of Make’s integrations and Google Drive (or another cloud storage space) to automatically archive attachments from Airtable.
This methodology would offload your attachments to Google Drive, but would also keep the link to the attachment within Airtable. This would enable you to always click on the link within Airtable to quickly get to your attachment in Google Drive.
Even better, if you’re accessing your Airtable base through the data layer, you can view previews of your Google Drive attachments in Airtable by using Airtable’s URL Preview extension or Airtable’s Embed extension. Each extension operates slightly differently, and the one you use depends on which Google Drive link you use. That’s because Google offers 2 different types of share links — one link takes you to a Google Drive “wrapper webpage” that contains the image, and the other link takes you directly to the attachment file itself.
From Airtable’s interface layer, if you have the direct link to the image itself, you can use the new URL field image preview in the interface layer.
Check out my screenshot below for one of the many different ways that you could set this up in Make.
You’ll notice that the screenshot starts off with a custom webhook module. This is because I wanted to immediately trigger the activation of this scenario from an Airtable automation. To do this, I wrote a custom script in Airtable, which you can see here.
If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve also assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.
Also, it can be tricky dealing with attachment fields because attachment fields are complex arrays. So, in this BuiltOnAir podcast episode, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.
Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld
