How to Turn a Photo Into a Url

Image Storage

You can display images and documents in your app.

Images are stored in Image column types; documents are stored in File column types.

Image or document values are stored in your spreadsheet as either a URL or a file name.

URL Value

If you store the value as a URL, make sure that the URL is publicly accessible! Many users who choose this option provide image URLs that appear accessible to them, but are not really accessible to the public. Here are some examples of bad image URLs:

Facebook: You may be able to access images from your Facebook album because you are logged into Facebook, but when some other user tries to see the image, they will get an error. Whenever you are using an image from some kind of online storage provider, make sure that public access permissions are provided.

Google Drive: Viewing an image on Google Drive shows your image on a web page that hosts an image, but the URL of the web page will not work as a link to your image. To get the correct URL for an image hosted on Drive, first use the "get shareable link" option in Share settings. This provides a URL like https://drive.google.com/open?id={fileID}. This still leads to a web page hosting your image, not the image itself, but it provides the file ID you need to create the final image link: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id={fileID}

Dropbox: Dropbox, like most cloud file systems, shows your image on a web page, but the web page itself is not actually an image. It is a web page that hosts an image. This article explains how to construct a link to a Dropbox image.

Local Computer: An image URL from your local computer of the form file://MyImages/MyImage.jpg or C:/MyImages/MyImage.jpg. AppSheet has no access to your local computer, nor do you have the option to upload an image to AppSheet. Instead, place your images in your cloud storage provider and use one of the mechanisms described above.

File Name Value

If you store the value as a file name, the image or document must be stored in your cloud file system, not on your own computer!

In the app editor, we provide a file selector widget that lets you browse your cloud file system to find an image.

If you are specifying an image or document file name in your spreadsheet, the file should be in the same folder location as your spreadsheet. For example, if you use Google Drive and your spreadsheet is in the /appsheet/data/MyApp folder, then if you have the image MyImage.jpg in the same folder, you can just use the value, MyImage.jpg, in the appropriate cell.

It is sometimes easier to organize images in their own folder. For that reason, we allow image file names to be specified relative to the location of the spreadsheet. For example, if your images are in a subfolder called Images, you can use the cell value, Images/MyImage.jpg or ./Images/MyImage.jpg.

See this Google Sheets article if you need assistance with image sizing.

Custom Image Guidelines

AppSheet downscales all images to 600 pixels (600px) wide, except for the app background image, which is 1000px wide. For custom images, we generally recommend using square images: 600x600px.

In the Detail View

The detail view has a "main" image. The main image is automatically selected but can be overridden with the Main image property.

The Image style property can be used to control how the image is shown: Fill will crop the image to fit the header area (great for photos); Fit will scale the image down to fit inside the header area (great for logos); and Background will use the image as a background for the whole view (great for pattern images and some photos).

In Fill mode, images shown at the top of the detail view will be a maximum of 768x400 pixels. On small screens (768px and below) the image will be 320px tall, otherwise it will be 400px tall. We recommend making a 768x400 image with the middle 375px as usable area, the sides will be cropped off on phones and other small screens. Here's a sample:

External URL for Image Files

By default, app images and other files identified by name (e.g., MyImage.JPG) or relative path (e.g., Images/MyImage.JPG) will not have a predictable, meaningful URL that can be readily used outside of the app. If you would like the images stored by the app to be available for other uses, you will need to take extra steps.

For security reasons, AppSheet produces cryptic public URLs for images and files stored by the app. To instead produce URLs that are less secure but more friendly to external use, this default security feature must be disabled. To do so, go to Security >> Options in the app editor and disable Require Image and File URL Signing:

By disabling Require Image and File URL Signing, you are making your app files less secure. An app user could potentially modify an image or file URL in order to view any other image or file stored by the app. This setting affects the security of all images and files stored by the app. It is best to leave the feature enabled if possible.

Next, configure your app to produce a URL that is usable outside the app for each image or file that should be so accessible. Add another (optionally virtual) column to the same table as the column containing the image or file name, with an App formula expression like this:

          CONCATENATE(
            "https://www.appsheet.com/template/gettablefileurl",
            "?appName=", ENCODEURL(CONTEXT("AppName")),
            "&tableName=", ENCODEURL(CONTEXT("Table")),
            "&fileName=", ENCODEURL([image-or-file-column])
)

Replace image-or-file-column with the name of the column containing the image or file name or relative path. No other changes to the expression above are needed.

Showing Images in Smartsheet

Normally, images are stored as files in a cloud file system and the name of the file is put into a cell of the corresponding row in the data spreadsheet. If your data is in Smartsheet however, there are a couple of extra considerations. Smartsheet does not have a traditional 'file system'. Instead, the images associated with any row should be stored as a row attachment and the name of the attachment file should be stored in the corresponding cell.

Smartsheet allows an image to be saved and shown inline within a cell. Any images captured via an AppSheet app will be saved as a row attachment and will also additionally display inline with the specific cell. However, if you are creating a data set for use with an AppSheet app, the inline images cannot be read and processed by AppSheet. You will need to create the images as row attachments as described earlier.

Image Caching

We cache images in Cloudflare because it is expensive to retrieve and serve images directly from AppSheet servers. It is even more expensive if we must resize the image before displaying it.

If you are reusing the image file URL and directly updating the contents of the image file, you will only see the updated image value once the cached image ages out of the Cloudflare cache.

If you enable Secure Image Access, we do not cache the image in Cloudflare and image retrieval performance will suffer. You can enable Secure Image Access by going to Security >> Options in the app editor:

How to Turn a Photo Into a Url

Source: http://help.appsheet.com/en/articles/961605-displaying-images-and-documents

Ackman Notenjoyard