Display Image in appsheet using URL

Hi Guys

I want to paste an Image url in my appsheet. And then want the respective image to be displayed in the appsheet.

How can i do that?

I believe AppSheet no longer allows for pulling in images from URL’s after tightening up image security.

You have two options:

  1. Paste the URL into a URL type column. When you save, there will automatically be an icon launch into a viewer that displays the image.

      b)  you could use a second SHOW type column with Category as URL and then use the HYPERLINK() function to create clickable text such as “See Image Here”
    
  2. If these are known images, you can manually place them into a folder under the default app folder and then create a data source to that folder (assuming you are using Google). This allows you to reference the Images as data rows and use/show them anywhere else in the app within Image type columns. They can be shown in dropdown lists as well for users to choose an image for an Image type column.

I hope this helps!!

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Thank you for the suggestions Willow.

I just played around with this for a while I found the following.

I made a normal image column and then made an action to write the text of a URL (not merely writing a URL column as a URL) and it worked. It’s also possible to pull URLs into the image column on the spreadsheet side.

For more options, please see this post of mine.

I shows how the choice of column type matters. Images appear differently in different column types.

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What did you use as the URL text?

I have been trying your method using the copied link from a Google Drive image. It doesn’t work that way for me.

I have never really understood how to use image URL’s as for almost every app I have built I have been able to create a table sourced from an image folder on Google Drive and never needed to worry about proper URL syntax.

I see what you mean. Yes, Google Drive can no longer be used to produce images in AppSheet.

I used a valid URL from my own website to test but it also works with urls like this from commercial websites:

![alfa-romeo-stelvio-copy-6809446b927a6](upload://69eKUWDBg5FHOPcZ0PMXJFeei9G.jpeg)

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Ahh. Yes that works for me.

Now, this brings me to a question I have never found an answer to…

Can we build, to Google Drive, a standard URL using the folder hierarcy and FILE NAME itself rather than the file ID syntax?

In other words can we do something more like this:

”https://drive.google.com/My Drive/Images/testimage.jpeg”

Instead of what we normally have when we copy a link like this:

”https://drive.google.com/file/d/5POLcQXXmEVLXJH1EjR3xx4KJGAguXu-z/view?usp=drive_link”

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I don’t know the answer to that. My impression is “not possible” but I hope someone will prove me wrong.

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Correct.

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That is the answer I expected based what I have found out there.

This may start to stray from original post but it is closely related so I’ll continue….

So, now I have to ask this question…

Why is that we can pull in images from EXTERNAL websites using URL’s but we cannot pull in images from the SAME eco-system (Google) using the Google URL’s?

I read in the post that it has something to do with third-party cookies. But what do cookies have to do with pulling in an image based on a URL in the first?

It just really doesn’t make sense, at least on the surface, but I can’t claim to have great knowledge about how things work in web apps with regards to image retrieval.

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I don’t know. I’d imagine this is an issue either with AppSheet or with Google Drive. I don’t know anything about the specifics, so I can’t say which. Both AppSheet and Google itself have some obscure/opaque policies around security and privacy that produce odd and non-intuitive behavior.

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I always build file paths like this, when generating a file via a bot for example, and want to have that file viewable from the AppSheet row, the path to the file will be from the location where the google sheet sits, for example, if the sheet is in the default AppSheet folder, I would put the generated file in a folder (within the same folder as the sheet) called Invoices, and then after the file is created, on another step the bot would write the file path as /Invoices/Invoice_101.pdf

I don’t see why images shouldn’t work the same way.

Have you tried this?

You don’t need to put the full drive.google.com url, just the path from the sheet to the file/image.

Yes. You are referring to “relative pathing” inside of the App Creator Google Account. The images are placed in a folder INSIDE of the app default path.

It may have been implied, but we were referring to EXTERNAL images - i.e. images outside of any AppSheet pathway and possibly on anyone’s Google account.

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