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  • How do I make it so replacing a Google Drive image updates it in a Google Slide?

I read this nifty tutorial, and I tried it with Google Drive ➜ Google Slide, but it looks like inserting a GDrive image in a slide DECOUPLES it, meaning it’s not actually referencing it anymore?

@nicksimard if you know? Since you wrote the great thing!

 

I tried “Embed item” in Google Drive, but it looks like that URL isn’t a valid image URL in Google Slide.

 

 

Alternatively, are there any other services like this with Zapier that aren’t just “a webpage” where I can specifically:

  1. Add an image
  2. Update it with Zapier
  3. See the change happen in seconds, without having to manually refresh?

Hey there, @TORLEY! 👋

Hope you don’t mind me hopping in for Nick here. I did some digging and it looks like Google no longer supports the URL format that was stated in the guide written by Nick. 

It looks as though the new URL format you’d need to use is https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=FILEID&sz=w1000 

With that, you’d replace the FILEID part with the ID for the image file. And depending on how big the image needs to be you’ll also want to update the w1000 part in the URL to the width in pixels that the image needs to be sized at. For example if you wanted the image to be displayed at 500px wide you’d update that part to w500

Can you give that a try and let us know whether that works and allows the Google Slide image to be updated correctly?

@SamB Thanks for digging deeper. I still don’t understand how that works, because once you add an image to a Google Slide, it appears to make a separate copy of it, and can’t reference an URL. So there’s apparently not something it can update/push from.

I spent a lot of time with earlier experimentation on this, and none of it went through as expected. I did confirm that doing it with Zapier from Google Drive ➜ Notion (or another similar webpage) does work.

Do you or anyone else have verification that this actually works with Google Slides?

Ah I see, apologies for the misunderstanding on my part there @TORLEY! 

I’ve been doing some testing on this end and you’re right it does appear that once the images are added into the Google Slide it seems to make a copy of it as you say, and not just link it to the actual file itself, which means that using that approach on Nick’s post won’t work for updating those images. 

Looking at the available actions for Google Slides it doesn’t look like that’s going to be possible. You’d need to:

  1. Be able to add the images to the slide - digging in further it appears that there’s a bug where supplying images for placeholders when using the Create Presentation from Template action isn’t working as expected. 
  2. Update the Slide to change the image - there’s no existing action for this but I found that there’s an open feature request for the ability to update a slide which would allow you to update the image on it.
     

So I’ve gone ahead and added you to the bug report and feature request mentioned above. I can’t make any promises around when those will be sorted but we’ll definitely send you an email notification as soon as they are. 

In the meantime, the only other workaround I could think of would be to potentially use the Google Slides API Request action to add/update the images. It’s a bit more advanced as you’d need to reference Google Slide's API documentation when setting up the request. But if it’s something you’d be interested in trying and assuming the Google Slides API supports it, please see our Set up an API request action guide to learn more.  

If you give that a try please keep us updated on how you get on!

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