Issue with Uploading Expense Photos to Glide via Make.com & Google Drive

Hi everyone,

I’m setting up a workflow where I need to snap multiple expense photos quickly and have them automatically uploaded to Glide to utilize their OCR integration.

Since speed is crucial, I don’t want to use the Glide upload picture component, as it requires waiting for each upload to complete.

My Current Setup:

To achieve this, I created a Make.com workflow using their Android app:

  1. When I take a photo, Make retrieves the filename and base64 data.
  2. Since Glide doesn’t support direct base64 uploads, I upload the file to Google Drive instead.
  3. I then store the Google Drive file link in a Glide image component.

Example URLs:

The Problem:

While I can successfully display these images in Glide, I run into issues when trying to process them with OCR.

:one: Image-to-Text (OCR) Issue:

When using the Image to Text component in Glide, I get the following error:

:two: Uploading the Download URL to an Image Column Fails Intermittently:

I attempted to “upload” the download URL into an image column using Set Column Values, but I often get this error:

  • Sometimes this works, but not consistently.
  • I added a “Wait for Condition” to ensure the column isn’t empty before processing, but the error occurs long before the 30-second timeout expires.
  • Could it be due to file size? The photos are 5-7MB each.

Question:

How should I handle uploading these images to Glide?
Or how can I change my setup so this isn’t a problem.

Any insights or workarounds would be greatly appreciated!

Tim

Actually, it does. base64 is just text, so it can be pushed through the API. I’ve done this with PDF files, but I’ve never tried it images. That said, I suspect that wouldn’t help you with the overall goal, as you’d still probably face a challenge processing the “image”. I don’t really have a good suggestion off the top of my head, sorry.

2 Likes

I would suggest doing this inside Glide. You may try to feed the download link from Drive there. It works.

https://storage.googleapis.com/glide-prod.appspot.com/uploads-v2/baRSwEYHL3spMMHPnS8H/pub/ghOqpMKE7YfKw7jVTOmU/Test.jpg

Image to text using that Glide URL.

2 Likes

There’s a missing part here where I’m not clear. Are you adding images separately in their own rows?

If that’s the case, I would suggest using a HTTP module in Make to trigger a webhook workflow in Glide, with the Drive link as part of the body.

Then, query out that link in the workflow, upload it to Glide using the Upload File module I stated above, and then add a new row with the resulting URL.

If you add it to an existing row, stuff would be mostly the same, just trigger the Glide webhook with the Drive URL and the rowID where you want to add the photo to. Then instead of add row, loop and find the row that matches your rowID, and do a set column.

2 Likes

Hi @ThinhDinh you’re amazing :slight_smile:,

How can it be that I wasn’t aware the “upload file” action existed in Glide.
And triggering this glide-upload-file-action via a Glide-Webhook-Trigger from make.com would be just perfect!

Each picture should indeed result in 1 row.

Thanks again for your advice.

Best regards,

Tim

1 Like

Glad to hear it work! Been using the Upload File action recently and I love it.

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