I came across the need to save all of the attachments for a feature class to a folder on my system today and thought I'd share this solution I put together. Thanks to Andrew Chapkowski for the real meat of this solution.
from arcpy import da
import os
# Specify the directory you want to save your attachments to
SaveFolder = r"C:\Users\johnmdye\Documents\ArcGIS\MyGDB_Attachments"
# Reference the Feature Class
FC = C:\Users\johnmdye\Documents\ArcGIS\MyGDB.gdb\Points_of_Interest
# Reference the Attachment Table for that Feature Class
AttachmentTable = C:\Users\johnmdye\Documents\ArcGIS\MyGDB.gdb\PointsOfInterest_ATTACH
# Setup a counter
a_count = 0
# Set up a SearchCursor on your Attribute Table to iterate on the
# 'rel_globalid', 'data' and 'att_name' attributes of your attachments
# which respectively contain the globalid of the feature related to that attachment,
# the data in bytes of that attachment and the name of the file as it was saved on
# the system which uploaded the attachment
with da.SearchCursor(AttachmentTable, ["rel_globalid", "data", "att_name"]) as Acursor:
# For each attachment
for a in Acursor:
# get the 'rel_globalid' as 'a_id'
a_id = a[0]
# get the 'data' as 'bytestream'
bytestream = a[1]
# get the 'att_name' as fname
fname= a[2]
# Parse the 'fname' value to determine the file-extension of the attachment
# This is important because your attachment data is encoded to an extension,
# so if you try write the attachment data to a file with the wrong extension
# (such as writing a .jpg attachment as .png or .pdf file instead of .jpg),
# your resulting file will not work because it won't adhere to the conventions
# of that datatype. Essentially, all your bits and bytes are in the wrong place
# for that kind of file.
ext = "." + fname.split('.',1)[1]
# Set up a SearchCursor on your Feature Class which the attachments are related
# to and iterate on the 'globalid' and 'last_edit' fields. Use of the 'last_edit'
# field will only work if you had Editor Tracking enabled on the dataset.
# If your data has a unique name field for all records, you could add that to
# the search cursor and with some slight modification, write some files that have
# that feature's unique name as the filename. I'm using the 'last_edit' field
# because its a date-time stamp that in the vast majority of cases, would be
# unique for each feature.
with da.SearchCursor(FeatureClass, ['globalid', 'revised']) as Fcursor:
# for each feature
for f in Fcursor:
# get the 'globalid' as 'f_id'
f_id = f[0]
# get the 'last_edit' date as 'f_dt'
f_dt = f[1]
# if the current attachment's 'rel_globalid' equals the feature's
# 'globalid'
if a_id == f_id:
# Yay! We found an attachment. Increment the counter by 1
a_count = a_count+1
# convert my 'last_edit' value from the feature to a python
# datetime object
dtObject = datetime.datetime.strptime(str(f_dt), '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
# convert my datetime object to a string representing that date
dtString = dtObject.strftime('%B.%d.%Y-%I.%M.%S')
try:
# Write my attachment to disk
open(os.path.join(SaveFolder,
fname[:-4] + "_" + dtString + ext),
'wb').write(bytestream.tobytes())
# If something bad happened while trying to write the attachment
# to disk
except Exception as e:
# Tell me why I'm a bad person
raise Exception(e)
print "All Done. Extracted " + str(a_count) + " attachments."
Thanks for sharing! it was just what I needed!