Question

How to get attachments from my last seven emails into one email pdf attachment

  • 11 April 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 31 views

Hi, 

New to this, here is what I am trying to do : 


I have 7 different people email me a picture everyday.  How can I get all those 7  ​​​pictures into one PDF document that is sent to a different email address?


3 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hi @ienmvlw, welcome to the Community! 🎉

Which email app are you using? The Gmail app for example has a New Attachment trigger that could be used to trigger on new email attachments that are received. That sort of trigger would allow you to use the attachment file in subsequent actions in the Zap.

Also, do the emails all have the same subject line or some consistent identifier between all of them? Perhaps you could use a filter in the Zap to ensure that the Zap only triggers on the correct emails. See: Add conditions to Zaps with filters

To store the images you could add them to a digest which is scheduled to be released at a certain time of day. When the digest is released the Zap would then generate the PDF using all the images and then send out the email. You can find out more about creating digests here:


For generating the PDF itself, there was a recent post in Community for a new app (DocuGenerate) that was added to Zapier which is able to create PDFs:


Alternatively, perhaps you could use a similar app like PDFMonkey? The full list of document-related apps available on Zapier can be found here: https://zapier.com/apps/categories/documents 

Do you think that approach could work? If you give the above a try and get stuck at all or have any questions just let us know - happy to help further! 🙂

 

Sorry, very new to this and some things are just quite confusing. So far this is what I have : 

Someone sends a picture to a email.  That picture (attachment) is uploaded to my google drive. 

That is far as I have gotten, I tried many things but I don’t know how to convert all the pictures into a single PDF.  I tried many times. 

Currently I have two pictures in that drive

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Thanks for getting back to me, @ienmvlw

Google Drive doesn’t have an action to find multiple images, it would only be able to find a single image at a time. So you’d likely need to collect a list of the links to the images in a digest to collect the images before releasing them to an action that generates the PDF. I’d recommend checking out this guide to learn more about how to schedule a digest to be released:

The example shows how you’d create a digest to be released on a weekly basis in an email but the same principle could be applied for creating a daily digest of image links that you release to an action that generates a PDF instead of sending an email with the list of the image links in the digest.

Then in whatever action you’re planning on using to generate the PDF you’d select the Current Digest field from the Digest action to give it the link of image links. This action would only generate the PDF once the digest was released. Looking at the DocuGenerate and PDFMonkey apps I mentioned previously it seems as though they require you to supply the content for the PDF in JSON format which might not be ideal here.

I did some digging and it seems like Google Slides might be a good option for generating the PDF:


You can learn more about how to create a Google Slides Presentation with a Zap here: How to Use the "Set up Google Slides Presentation" Action

That said, you may also need to use a Formatter (Text > Split Text) action to separate the images into separate fields you may need additional actions to split the links up into separate fields that you can select for each template field on the Google Slide presentation. You can learn more about how to use Formatter here: Split text fields in Zaps

Hope that helps to get you pointed in the right direction. If you run into any issues on that or have further questions just let me know!

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