UnManaged Attachments

[AndrewRudin]

Add the ability when enabling attachments on feature classes, I have the option to store just a link to files in the attachments table.  I would much rather store Photos, Documents, and other files related to a feature in a place on a shared drive so anyone and any application can easily get to them without ArcGIS.   I don't want to store blobs for photos and documents in our database.  Storing blobs in SDE means any other application we write that needs to see those attachments will have to tack on some ArcObjects code to pull out the file.

This would be similar to the difference between managed and unmanaged raster catalogs.

[JakeKrall]

Great idea...I would like to see this functionality added to the MXD as well as feature classes.  I want to save links to Word docs, pdfs, Excel sheets, Autocad dwg's, images/photos etc. but dont see a way to do it now.  Please add this to the MXD too!  Or am I missing something???

[AndrewRudin]

A lot of our users would prefer to store just a link to a folder.  That way they don't have to micromanage all the attachments on each feature if there are alot of related documents.  This works only if a group happens to have related data already organized with one folder setup for every feature...but if you give people the option they can decide which way is best for their organization

[JeffForeman]

When enabling attachments on a feature class, give the option to store the attachments outside of the geodatabase on a seperate file server. Instead of storing the attachment as a BLOB in the related database table, your related table would contain a path to a file server where your attachment is stored.

[MichaelVolz]

This would be a very useful alternative to vastly decrease data duplication if you already have the attachments in another robust RDBMS that can mange these files more efficiently than ESRI feature classes.

[EricGeddes]

Absolutely. A couple other ideas are basically asking the same thing, and another dozen (or more!) would be resolved (or could be more easily resolved) if this were to be implemented. 

That said, what about adding geoprocessing functionality to "push attachments to files" that would, at the database level, extract the files as documents to be stored in a specified location, and replaced with a hyperlink to them. Similarly a "gather files for document" (or similar) could reverse the process???

[JohnMDye]

Agree. Would be great if I could point it to an S3 bucket for attachments. A popular feature service with attachment s enabled can really eat up your service credits with storage costs.

[Anonymous User]

Attachments are not part of feature storage. For any service published after July 2, 2014 attachments are charged as file storage which runs 1.2 credits per 1 GB/month.

https://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgisonline/credits

http://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/administer/view-status.htm#ESRI_SECTION1_1D001100A7A24CDF85A0... “

[JohnMDye]

Thanks for the clarity.

[QuinnBast]

I know this is old and marked as "reviewed", but this is still 100% necessary. It's not just an issue with credits/file storage. Storing data as BLOBs can really increase database size and takes a massive performance hit as storage skyrockets. Not to mention working with BLOB formats is just terrible. Being able to reference attached files in their natural file formats and providing a file path to their location in a file server would be 100 times better than the current BLOB storage method.

[GideonDalrymple]

How do you do that. I've tried it and can't find that option. I'm working with an enterprise geodatabase. Really need help cause I tried to add more data and it says that I have no more space. 

Can anyone help? Would greatly appreciate it.