Hi all, hope you are enjoying a great time of the year with your family and friends. Firstly, merry Xmas & Happy New Year!
The issue of not being able to generate a thumbnail for videos uploaded to Glide has bugged me for a while. Months ago I was working on a dancing app for LowCode.Agency and the client had to upload their own-made GIFs to Giphy, then paste the link back to the Sheet. It took so much time so I was wondering if there’s a workaround.
Recently @Robert_Petitto also talked about this in one of his posts and today I found out a way, using a combination of Zapier and Cloudinary.
Here’s the video.
How it works in the backend:
1/When a new video is uploaded to Glide, my zap is triggered and upload that video to my Cloudinary. Then I update the row in Google Sheets with the newly uploaded Cloudinary video.
2/I use a Google Sheet formula to add some parameters to the video link (e_preview and e_loop) to generate a preview GIF and make it loop endlessly.
Disclaimer: It does took some minutes for the Zap to finish running and the GIF to be loaded in Glide, I cut those parts out of the video.
Here’s a copyable link for the Zap: Anytime a new spreadsheet row is created in Google Sheets, upload resource in Cloudinary and update spreadsheet row in Google Sheets. | Zapier
Here’s the formula in the Sheet:
={"Image link";ARRAYFORMULA(IF(B2:B<>"",SUBSTITUTE(LEFT(B2:B,LEN(B2:B)-4),"upload/","upload/e_preview/e_loop/")&".gif",""))}
