I’ve successfully set up Zapier to extract images from incoming emails, but I’m running into issues when trying to save these images to my MySQL database. The images seem to get stored in the database table, but when I try to view them later, nothing shows up properly. I’m pretty new to handling image storage in databases, so I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong with the data format or if there’s a better approach I should be using. Has anyone dealt with a similar situation where you need to take images that Zapier pulls from emails and store them in a way that they can be retrieved and displayed later? Any guidance on the proper method to handle this would be really helpful.
had the same issue last month! zapier sends images as base64 strings but doesn’t handle the mime type right. check if you’re getting the full data:image/jpeg;base64 prefix or just the encoded part. also, make sure your mysql column is LONGBLOB, not BLOB - learned that the hard way when larger images got cut off.
Had this same issue six months back. Zapier was mangling the image data when pulling from emails - sometimes no headers, sometimes corrupted encoding. Depends on which email client sent the original image. Here’s what fixed it: I added a webhook step to validate the image data before it hits MySQL. Also stopped storing the actual files in the database - just keep the metadata there and use separate storage for the images. Way faster since you’re not loading huge binary data every query. Test with different email clients too. Outlook and Gmail handle attachments completely differently.
Storing images in databases can definitely be tricky. It seems like you might be encountering an issue with how the image data is being encoded by Zapier. I recommend not saving the images directly in your MySQL database. Instead, save them to a file system or a cloud service like AWS S3, and just keep the file path or URL in your database. This method is generally more efficient and easier to manage. If you have to store them in the database, ensure you use the LONGBLOB type and base64 encode the images before inserting them. Also, check the format of the incoming data from Zapier, as it can vary and may require different handling.