Can you update an Image column via the API?

As it says in the title - is it possible to use the API to create/update the value of an Image column in a table? I see that the examples show just passing text values.

Context:

I’m considering migrating something I currently use Tiddlywiki for to Coda. One thing this would involve is copying over around 700 pages, all of which have the same standard fields and contain some images, into a Coda table. Obviously, this isn’t something I want to do by hand.

It looks like the Coda API allows you to create and update table rows, so it seems like that should work well for transferring all the field values. However, I can’t tell if it’s possible to also update the Image an column with the images that are in those pages.

Alternately, if anybody has a suggestion on some other way to mass-update stuff like this, I’d be interested. Thanks!

1 Like

Hi @Mikhail_Gordin, unfortunately image columns are not supported in the API at this time, though we do have that on our backlog.

One workaround I’d suggest for now is to upload and host your images to a third-party service (or wherever they currently are hosted) and then use the Image URL column format to auto display those URLs as pictures within Coda. If you do want them hosted within Coda then manually copy/pasting is your best bet, though maybe you could write a Tampermonkey script to automate that.

Hey @oleg
Copy&paste doesn’t really work for images.
Only direct upload or drag&drop in table view.
Poor perfornance for attachments.

Copy-paste should work if you copy the entire file to your clipboard, though you’d have to paste in one by one:

I can confirm that pasting into a table cell, or in detailed view on the image cell (ctrl-v, Windows 10) doesn’t work for me either, both by copying a file or by trying to paste from the snippet tool.
Dragging and dropping a file works, but ideally I’d be able to copy paste.

Is it possible, somehow (natively, Zapier or Hotkey) to:

  • Have paste attempts be caught on rows or cards and auto uploaded to the images cell?
  • Paste into the rich text field if an images column exists and have the image be uploaded to the image cell, while an insert is placed into the rich text? (Much like this forum allows)

It’s very much possible there’s a bug on Windows that’s preventing paste from working :sweat_smile: - I reported it so we look into it.

As for your second point, I can totally see how it’d be useful to support uploading images into rich text within cells, though sadly cells only offer a limited number of formatting options at this time (for example, you can’t insert a table into a table cell). What you can do, however, is use a Concatenate() formula to combine multiple cells together, including ones containing rich text and images.

Hi Oleg! Is the current version of the API supporting image uploads through the API?

Hi @Max_Pauwels, we keep our API documentation up to date. Image uploads through the API are still not supported and we just haven’t had enough requests for that to prioritize vs. other work such as non-image attachments. Your best bet is to still follow the earlier workaround of using another service to upload the image to, and include a URL to it within Coda / your API payload.

Are there better solutions to this nowadays? I see that pack tables do support returning image attachments into Coda.

Cross posting: How to upload/download images from table with Coda API? - #5 by oleg