CrossDoc Multiple Images

1

Anyone have a work-around for getting cells with multiple images to transfer cross-doc?

Currently, if I add multiple images to an “Image” column in one doc and then send that row to another doc, they won’t show up. It won’t show anything at all if the receiving column is also an “Image” column, and won’t show any more than one image if the receiving column is an “Image url” column. If the receiving column is a “Text” column, it will display text of the image file names, but nothing usable.

I really need to be able to transfer and view multiple images in one column.

Any ideas?

2

Anybody have any ideas?

3

Dear @Joel_Baerg,

According my personal understanding,

The concept of “cross doc” between Coda docs has not been mentioned for this kind of usecase

In general a Coda doc is not suitable to use as a file repository, the doc itself has a capacity around the 125MB

4

Hi Jean-Pierre,

Thanks for responding. I figured this might not be a common issue, but was hoping that there might be a work-around.

If you have any ideas about how to get multiple images from one column in one doc to another I would be very keen to hear!

Thanks

5

Dear @Joel_Baerg,

Sharing an image in another table through a lookup takes a serious amount of time, I can imagine what it will be with cross doc :frowning_face:

I am afraid that on this subject this is a no go and would consider if you can place them in a folder on Dropbox or a similar solution with a hyperlink

6

Hey @Joel_Baerg,

Try this workaround: first extract URLs of those images, cross-doc the URLs (could be an issue of its own, you may want to .ToText() them first), then turn back into images with Image() formula (most likely in a FormulaMap()) on the receiving side.

If the endpoint that serves images is dumb enough (i.e. doesn’t check what page tries to load the images, the original one or some other doc), it should work. I have a feeling it should.

Also re 125 MB, it’s only for the doc, not the images (most likely, as they are stored separately from JSONs). It’s quite a lot of headroom actually. And also this limit only matters for cross-doc — opening the doc would still work.

1 Like
7

Hey, @Paul_Danyliuk.
I have a question for you.
In this help article, https://help.coda.io/en/articles/3082785-troubleshooting-memory-issues,
@maria states that you can run out of memory if you have a doc with too many images in a table or large images. That you’d better use images URLs.
If images are stored separately from the DOC itself, how can that be possible?

8

Hey, @Joel_Baerg.
I’m currently using cross-doc to archive a multiple image column.
I haven’t had any issue with it.
Would you mind to share your Doc here?
It’s the best way to get help from the community.

9

I think what Maria refers to there is that your browser (on phone, PC) can run out of memory if it has to load and display many images. Android apps, for example, used to have something like 200MB RAM usage limit (not sure how much now). It’s not about the doc file size.

I don’t think any documentation ever refers to doc file size actually. I learned about the 125M limit from Coda support, and only because I was running into it all the time with my docs (I usually build very complicated docs for hire). Normally you wouldn’t run into this if you aren’t trying to manage big loads of complex data in Coda. Most “normie” docs would run under 20–30 MB, I imagine.

1 Like
10

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the input. I’m struggling with figuring out how to convert the URLs back into images though. Here’s my only attempt that didn’t just return an error.

FormulaMap([image url column], image([image url column]))

What should I be trying?

11

Hi Breno_Nunes,

Sorry. I wish I could, but the Doc is full of sensitive information, so I would have to recreate it in order to share it.

I think we’re getting there though.

12

If you have a list of URLs in your receiving doc (you can try [Image URLs column].Count() to see if it’s properly counting as 2,3,etc), then yeah,

[Image URLs column].FormulaMap(Image(CurrentValue))
13

Ok, I think we’re getting there. I am able to reconvert the URLs to images in the receiving Doc, but am only getting duplicates of one photo because the source Doc is producing identical URLs for my source images. How might I tweak the formula to fix that?

formulamap(thisRow.Photos,_Deref_Object(_Merge(thisRow.Photos), “publicUrl”))

14

Again, you’re not using CurrentValue within FormulaMap. Replace _Merge(thisRow.Photos) with _Merge(CurrentValue)

15

Ahh, yes. That did it. Thank you!