Displaying row attachments in dashboard

KelliBretsch
KelliBretsch ✭✭✭
edited 12/20/22 in Smartsheet Basics

Hello, we are a general contractor with building projects across the US. Every day our superintendents on site complete a daily progress form with site weather and progress status. They also attach progress photos, which are then attached to our report row.

We are looking for a way to display these daily images on a dashboard for the property owners and lenders to see as well.

Does anyone have any experience, recommendations or suggestions on a way to accomplish this?

So far the only solution we have come across requires us to manually move the images into a cell and then rename each image, allow access to the report or provide the option for them to click on the attachment. This isn't a good solution as each daily report can have 10-20 photos. Ideally they would just display. Or at least only need to click on one link to see all the photos.

Answers

  • Brian_Richardson
    Brian_Richardson Overachievers Alumni

    If you're using the mobile app you can insert photos from the phone's photo library or by taking a picture, but it's limited to 1 photo per cell when editing a sheet. It does display the photos inline. So you could potentially do something with that - attaching photos to multiple cells, but it's a little awkward. You'd have a report, though, that could have 1-20 pictures displayed inline for each project on a dashboard.

    You can also display the photos in Card view, which looks a little nicer. If you setup a "photo capture" sheet with a row per photo you could capture and show those photos in Card View and use filters to view the ones you're interested in - have a dropdown column with Project Names in it or something similar. You can publish Card View reports and use the publish link in the Web Content widget on a dashboard to show it.

    Other than that, the other thing I can think of is to use a service like Google Photos to store the pictures, maybe in different albums, share those albums, and embed that into your dashboards using the Web Content widget.

    There's no "display attachment images" function as far as I know.

    If you have the Bridge addon, you could use that to take images from rows when they are attached and push them into cells using the Smartsheet API. That would be the advanced method, but end result is you'll still need to display the images using reports and cells.

    BRIAN RICHARDSON | PMO TOOLS AND RESOURCES | HE|HIM

    SEATTLE WA, USA

    IRON MOUNTAIN

  • Thanks Brian! We are exploring the bridge add on option.