Topic
An image hosted in Google Drive won't render in Nintex, including, but not limited to, a Nintex Form or an email from a Nintex Workflow in SharePoint On-Premises, SharePoint Online, or Nintex Automation Cloud.
In the network trace of your Nintex Form loading, you may see a 403 error from Google Drive.
Instructions
As of early January 2024, Google Drive is experiencing an issue with their hosting links not working. Google has the issue documented here: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/319531488?pli=1
The closing note (comment #175) from Google on this bug is as follows:
"Closing this issue as working as intended. I tried to buy some more time with team owning this to no avail. Some points:
- Related to phase out of third party cookies.
- October 2023 Blog Post
- This was never an officially supported usage. (Same for
lh3.google.com, thumbnail links mentioned above, etc)
As to options going forward:
- Use the embed pattern described in the above blog post or here
- Move files to a location designed for hosting, e.g. Google Cloud Storage or any number of hosting providers for static content
- Proxy the files through the Google Drive API using your own infrastructure, e.g. Google Cloud Functions, watch out for egress costs and hot linking, probably want a CDN too
- Use a hosted proxy service as mentioned above"
Additional Information
The most common use case for Nintex customers may be hosting an image (such as for branding) to present on a Nintex Form or email from a Nintex Workflow. However, this issue seems to affect all file types (HTML, CSS, mp3, mp4, jpeg, png, etc.)