Display an image in a Fusiontable, which is stored in Google Drive

Question

I uploaded some images to a public folder in my Google Drive and would like to display them in a Fusiontable. I defined a column "link" as "Four line image" and store a link to the image there in the following format (provided by @Mori)

https://drive.google.com/uc?id=FILE-ID

example: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=0B6qZJQj7B-4ERS1KZ3p2SE9IbkU

I also tried the following format (provided by @niutech)

http://googledrive.com/host/<folderID>/<filename>

Unfortunately the result looks like this (screenshot 1)

Only after right click onto the image placeholder and selecting "View image", the image is displayed in a separate window. Now going back to the fusiontable the image appears correctly, see screenshot 2:

What could be the solution to this problem? I would like to see all images without need to right click first. Btw, I'm using Firefox.

EDIT: I now set the Fusiontable to "visible to anybody with link" and tested with Google Chrome and Opera. There it works fine. Firefox still does not work. Seems to be a browser issue...

Answer 1

You almost had the correct answer. You have to change your picture's URL from the one for viewing the picture, to a direct URL for download.

See https://www.labnol.org/internet/direct-links-for-google-drive/28356/ for details.

I managed to do this in a calculated column (I use google form to gather info, then google spreadsheet and than synchronized fusion table). I changed the URL with spreadsheet formula:

=CONCAT("https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=",right(left('URL',(len('URL')-17)),len('URL')-49))

Where 'URL' is the URL for viewing your picture in the browser.

Hope it helps anyone else!

Answer 2

After many attempts I was only able to upload my own images to fusion tables via Dropbox and not Drive. I could not find a way to automate this, so for many images it might be better to go to another visualization platform.

1. Upload the images to your personal Dropbox (mine were .png) For each image:
2. Click on Share -> Create a Link -> Copy link.
3. Open the 'shareable link' in a new tab. It might help to open the link in a private browser to check that anyone not logged in to Dropbox can view the image. Then right click on your image and go to 'Copy Image Location' (Firefox) or 'Copy Image Address' (Chrome). You will notice if you put this link in a new tab it will prompt you to automatically start downloading the image.
4. Paste this image location URL into the appropriate fusion table cell and make sure the column attribute is defined as e.g. "Four line image" and not 'URL'.

Answer 3

I now set the Fusiontable to "visible to anybody with link" and tested with Google Chrome and Opera. There it works fine. Firefox still does not work. Seems to be a browser issue...