Images from Google Docs not displaying in Cooliris media feed

Other Questions Google docs
1

I’m working on a web project for my university course where we need to showcase design patterns. Our team has been using Google Docs to store all our pattern presentations and we want to display them through Cooliris.

Here’s what we have set up:

  • Individual images can be accessed from each presentation using direct Google Docs URLs
  • We built an RSS feed specifically for Cooliris integration

Our RSS structure looks like this:

<entry>
  <name>design_pattern_3.45</name>
  <reference>https://docs.google.com/file?id=xyz123abc_456def789ghi_j</reference>
  <identifier>xyz123abc_456def789ghi_j</identifier>
  <media:preview url="https://docs.google.com/file?id=xyz123abc_456def789ghi_j" />
  <media:source url="https://docs.google.com/file?id=xyz123abc_456def789ghi_j" type="image/png" />
</entry>

The RSS feed validates correctly and Cooliris recognizes all the items in our feed. However, when viewing through Cooliris, all thumbnails and full-size images appear as black squares instead of showing the actual content.

The strange thing is that these same URLs work fine when opened directly in a browser - they download the images without any issues. Since we specified the correct MIME type, Cooliris should be able to handle them properly.

Has anyone encountered similar issues when trying to display Google Docs images through Cooliris? Any suggestions on what might be causing this problem?

2

yea, that seems like a CORS prob. google docs might block apps from fetching images even if direct links wrk in browser. u could try converting images to base64 or maybe host them on imgur for testing. hope that helps!

3

Google Docs has some weird restrictions when it comes to embedding images in third-party applications. I’ve dealt with this before and found that the URLs you’re using don’t actually point to raw image data that Cooliris can process directly. Even though they work in browsers, that’s because browsers handle the Google authentication flow automatically. What you need is to export your images from Google Docs first, then upload them to a proper image hosting service. I had success using GitHub Pages for a similar project since it’s free and reliable. You could also try using the export parameter in your URLs like &export=png, but honestly that approach was hit or miss for me. The most reliable solution was just downloading the images locally and hosting them properly. It’s a bit more work but saves you from dealing with Google’s API quirks.

4

I ran into something similar when working with Google Docs API integration last year. The issue is that Google Docs requires proper authentication headers for programmatic access, even when the files are publicly accessible. Cooliris likely cannot pass the necessary authentication tokens when fetching the images. What worked for me was using Google Drive’s sharing mechanism instead of direct document URLs. Try sharing your images through Google Drive with public access and use the Drive API URLs rather than Docs URLs. The format should be something like https://drive.google.com/uc?id=YOUR_FILE_ID&export=download. This bypasses the authentication requirements that Cooliris cannot handle. Alternatively, you might need to implement a proxy server that handles the Google authentication and serves the images to Cooliris with proper headers.