topic Re: Attachments not found in ArcGIS Online Questions

Attachments not found

EmilySpeck — Tue, 28 May 2024 13:10:26 GMT

Hello,

I had a point layer on ArcGIS Online with photo attachments that we exported into a shapefile. Since then, imported into ArcPro and the attachments are not showing. I enabled the attachments and still showing there are no attachments found.

Re: Attachments not found

MobiusSnake — Tue, 28 May 2024 14:34:53 GMT

Shapefiles don't support attachments, exporting to shapefile won't include them.

Export to File GDB or Mobile GDB instead, those formats support attachments.

Re: Attachments not found

EmilySpeck — Tue, 28 May 2024 14:39:41 GMT

Am I able to export the shapefile to the other files and get the attachments?

Re: Attachments not found

MobiusSnake — Tue, 28 May 2024 14:50:41 GMT

No, exporting to shapefiles leaves the attachments behind. Shapefile is an old file format that dates back to the 90s, attachments weren't part of ArcGIS until the late-00s, so shapefiles have no concept of attachments. You need to export to a GDB format to maintain your attachments.

One alternative to this would be to export to a shapefile then write a script (using Python for example) to extract attachments using the REST API, however this is obviously much more complicated than just exporting to GDB.

It's probably worth mentioning that shapefiles are "lossy" in other ways as well, for example date/time fields in shapefiles don't support time components, so you'll lose that information. They also don't handle null values well, Global IDs, etc...