Let's say you want to do a Bulk Import – or as we call it, a Data Load of some type of content or member profiles. And let's say you have some nice images to go with it.
You can do it using the free Google Drive to host all your images and paste the unique link of the image hosted on Google Drive. It sounds super simple right; however, Google makes it extremely difficult to get that publicly accessible link. We put together this guide to show a workaround.
For this guide, we will be setting up this "ScaleGrowth Logo.png" image for the Data Load:
To do this, you need to have a direct link to this image that is publicly accessible.
- First, let's upload it to your Google Drive
- Once you do, right click the image you wish to upload and select Share:
- and make sure that the image is Publicly Accessible
- Click the "Copy link" to copy the Image Share Link.
This is where it gets tricky - this image Share Link is NOT a direct link to the image itself, but link to Google Drive's built-in Image Viewer interactive UI tool. However, this link contains a very important element for accessing the Image, which is the image's unique ID.
Now, every image has a unique ID on Google Drive. We need that unique ID for the image. Note, Google Drive Folder also has ID. So please follow our instructions exactly to get the right ID of your image.
- Copy the Share Link and paste it into your browser, you will see this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MmyhnUxKYxqwXOpZyEy57oVjmbJqrIem/view?usp=sharing
(note the part in bold, we will refer to it later as the IMAGE_ID)
- We did our homework and research for you, and here is the Google Drive Image Link template you can use to drop in your IMAGE_ID
https://drive.google.com/u/1/uc?id=IMAGE_ID&export=view
- With our example, the correct publicly accessible link for image is as this
https://drive.google.com/u/1/uc?id=1MmyhnUxKYxqwXOpZyEy57oVjmbJqrIem&export=view
If you are curious where and how we did our research, here is a guide you can read on.
- And if you now paste/click on the right link you will see the actual image itself. And this exactly link is the link you want to paste to your Bulk Import File. Not any other links.
https://drive.google.com/u/1/uc?id=1MmyhnUxKYxqwXOpZyEy57oVjmbJqrIem&export=view
So to summary this, here is the link template for you and the only one that will work:
https://drive.google.com/u/1/uc?id=IMAGE_ID&export=view
Hope this helps you in your battles with Google Drive's tricky-ness!
