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How can I auto-refresh an embedded Google Drive image on a web page using Zapier?

  • 30 January 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 243 views

I have some pieces of this working.

I’ve gotten Zapier to update a Google Drive image, so when I look at it in Google Drive, it refreshes.

If I open the Google Drive full-screen/preview link and hit refresh manually, it works.

Google Slides does not appear to support linking to an updated image — it makes its own copy, so I’m looking for a different solution.

Unfortunately, I tried using the Google Drive app on a Wix site, and apparently due to server caching and other issues, I tried its auto-refresh timer and it still wasn’t showing the page. Their support told me I need to publish each time. But even then, it wasn’t updating, so it doesn’t do what I’m looking for.

I did get it working on a Notion page, which is limited with styling, but functional.

But what I’d like is this:

  • Simple minimalist web page shows Google Drive image (that’s being automated by Zapier). It’s important it can embed and link to the actual image, not make a separate copy.
  • Webpage itself seamlessly refreshes or is pushed to refresh every X seconds (i.e., it doesn’t go blank white for a moment).

Is there a simple, turnkey solution that exists for this?

This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

3 replies

SamB
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Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hey @TORLEY! 🙂

You could use Interfaces to create the web page that shows the Google Drive image. It would allow you to add a Media component to the Interfaces page that could display an image using a URL, so it wouldn’t make a separate copy of it.

But it wouldn’t be possible to set it to automatically refresh the page every X seconds. If you were viewing the page you’d need to manually refresh it in order to see the updated version on the image. Can I ask why it needs to automatically refresh every X seconds? Is it that you’re looking to have a set of image that appear on rotation?

TORLEY
Userlevel 3
Badge

@SamB Thanks, always good to get your help on here. Alas we’ve found some serious limitations with Google Drive images and inability to DIRECTLY link to them which isn’t immediately intuitive or obvious, so I’m looking into alternatives. As you recall from helping me on another topic, there are oddities how Google Drive images, Slides, and Sheets don’t play well together in the Google ecosystem.

Re: “why it needs to automatically refresh every X seconds”, it’s a live content feed, so we’d want it to seamlessly show the newest updates without having to keep refreshing. Like some webpages can do with the news while you leave it idle. That’s all. For now I’m trying something where it’s posting one image after another to a Tumblr, with a Chrome extension to auto-refresh the webpage. That seems to be working.

SamB
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

You are most welcome @TORLEY! 🤗

Alas we’ve found some serious limitations with Google Drive images and inability to DIRECTLY link to them which isn’t immediately intuitive or obvious, so I’m looking into alternatives. As you recall from helping me on another topic, there are oddities how Google Drive images, Slides, and Sheets don’t play well together in the Google ecosystem.

I do indeed recall that! Such a shame that Google Slides wasn’t able to reference the image files directly and could only embed a copy of them. If anything changes on that front I’ll be sure to post an update in that other thread to let you know. 
 

Re: “why it needs to automatically refresh every X seconds”, it’s a live content feed, so we’d want it to seamlessly show the newest updates without having to keep refreshing. Like some webpages can do with the news while you leave it idle. That’s all. For now I’m trying something where it’s posting one image after another to a Tumblr, with a Chrome extension to auto-refresh the webpage. That seems to be working.

Ah, I see! Thanks for clarifying the reason behind why it needing to auto-refresh. I’m so pleased to hear you were able to get an alternative solution in place using Tumblr and a Chrome extension to auto-refresh the webpage, great work on that! 🙌

If I can help with anything else at all just let me know, until then happy Zapping! 😁⚡

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