topic Re: Best field/method to use to attach multiple photos to features in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Best field/method to use to attach multiple photos to features

twilliamson_topv — Thu, 29 May 2025 23:45:39 GMT

Hello.

I had previously set up attachments for a feature class of art for my town. It is seeming that our arts department is going to want to be able to have multiple photos for some of these features.

Before, I had simply used the OBJECTID as the Input Join Field and then had the photos named to match this. For example, OBJECTID 1 had an attachment from a folder of art photos and the corresponding photo in that folder was named "1".

I'm thinking this will not work for multiple photos per feature. I have attached a screenshot of the current attribute table.

What would be the best way of going about this?

The final product is going to be an ArcGIS StoryMap Map Tour for this art. I know the City of Tempe has multiple photos set up for their art seen here: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/878970f6a27d49c6872eea73b1bd65b9/page/Story-Map/

I would like to not need to do this one by one.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Re: Best field/method to use to attach multiple photos to features

DavidSolari — Thu, 29 May 2025 23:58:31 GMT

A few ways to do this, each with their own compromises:

Add multiple attachment fields and populate as many as you need. This is a bad data design practice because you now have a maximum attachment limit, and any feature without that maximum has a bunch of null data, but it can be a practical solution.
Create a table of attachment links and define a one to many relationship class from the art points to the attachment records. The main limit here is configuring your pop-ups to load in the photos in a user-friendly way regardless of how many there are, I'm stuck on Enterprise 11.1 so maybe someone else will come in with some pointers.
Use the standard ArcGIS attachment format on your feature class and load the photos in there. This has the best compatibility with web maps but it means a copy of your source data has to sit in a special database table.

Re: Best field/method to use to attach multiple photos to features

twilliamson_topv — Fri, 30 May 2025 00:11:53 GMT

Awesome response! Thank you. I will explore these options, but it sounds to me like Number 3 may be my best bet for this process.

Re: Best field/method to use to attach multiple photos to features

Debert — Fri, 30 May 2025 15:09:36 GMT

Hi @twilliamson_topv

Sorry for the terrible comment.. but I believe I successfully achieved this prior. I don't remember the exact naming sequence I used, but I believe I just ran the #Add Attachments Tool for however many photos I had to add to a feature i.e. if I had 4 photos to batch add to a feature, I ran the #Add Attachment tool 4x. It doesn't seem to matter if the other features only have 1 or 2 photos, it worked.

Working with Multiple Attachments in ArcGIS Pro

Re: Best field/method to use to attach multiple photos to features

twilliamson_topv — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 21:26:34 GMT

Sorry for the incredibly late reply. I thank you for your response!

I ended up just doing it the manual way: Enabling attachments for the layer > Turning on editing > Opening the attribute pane > Adding the attachments individually per record.

Re: Best field/method to use to attach multiple photos to features

Debert — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:06:03 GMT

I posted a similar topic and have found the solution here.