Sharing text AND IMAGES through Google sheets

If you are storing the data for your app in Google sheets, you are probably aware that you can, if you choose to do so, share that sheet which someone else and thereby share any text or numerical data in that sheet. Are you aware, though, that you can also share images in this way? Itโ€™s actually quite easy to do.

The following image displays data that my students have shared with me, along with my comments and evaluation:

Each student in the class is using a copy of an app that I have made public as a sample. We are all using separate free accounts. They have shared their sheets with me but they have not shared their Google Drive folders or individual photos with me. So, how is this possible?

I asked them to open their Google sheets and then, in the File menu, open their Document Details to find the location in which their sheets are stored. They typed this information into a record in their apps into which I asked them to type a special tag to allow me to identify that record as an assignment that is being submitted. As a result, when the students did the task correctly I had the address of their image (recorded as text when the student uploaded his or her screenshot), the location (the data they found in the Google spreadsheet), and the name of the name of the table (I know the name of the table because I made the app). With this data, I was able to automatically generate a link to each image, even though all of the accounts are different. The method for generating links to display images is explained here:

In the past, I though that displaying images inside of sheets was merely a convenience for people viewing the sheets in which data is stored. Now, however, Iโ€™ve found that itโ€™s a way for people using different accounts and different apps to share their images, if they choose to do so.

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UPDATE: This tip is still basically valid but I now know that I donโ€™t need to ask the students to collect their app names. Iโ€™ve added an action that uses CONTEXT(AppName) to do that automatically. I got the idea from this post by @tsuji_koichi :

Actually, I use CONTEXT() quite a lot but I had forgotten that I could get the app name with it.

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