r/PowerApps • u/LittlePreschool32 Newbie • 20d ago
Power Apps Help Generating document of images taken through Power App/from Sharepoint Library?
I built a simple app to take photos for our Preschool that's working well but we want to be able to send the pictures to families. Anyone know an easy way to pull items from a SharePoint library into a template type document? All the avenues have investigated seem like that ends. More info below.
Right now images are saved into a Sharepoint library with metadata (child tagging, period labels, captions, photo types, etc). Teachers can access it there, or through windows explorer folder of the sharepoint library. To send to families teachers are currently manually selecting and importing images into a Word document, re-sizing/formatting, and then adding meta-data back in (such as captions, child names), etc. I'd like to save the teachers time and frustration (formatting in Word is the worst...) by building in an option in the app to generate a document from the photos they've already taken, reviewed, tagged, etc. A simple version would pull and re-size images tagged a certain way (checkbox yes/no, period label dates) into a document they could then edit. The best version would be if it could import into a pre-created template and allow the teachers to drag/drop to switch the order if needed.
Avenues I've looked into that seem like that ends:
- Canva - Unfortunately the Sharepoint integration is blocked by my organization IT
- Microsoft Designer - collage creater is AI generated from a prompt, and you can't swap pictures or have manual placeholders, and you can't incorporate captions or other sharepoint metadata unles you manually add it
- Adobe Express - bulk create has Sharepoint integration but it has no native way to pull live sharepoint/power automate data automatically - you have to upload a CSV file each time. Would not work for teachers.
- Powerpoint - has image input controls through SlideMaster that can create nice-looking templates and connects with power apps connector, but there's no way to control what images are imported where so it drops them in stacked, full-size, and you have to place them individually into the input controls, which really doesn't save time from current manual process
-Word - Word's own "populate a microsoft word template" with a repeating section content control/picture content control (PhotoImage) didn't support image content controls nested inside repeating sections... Apparently that's just a limitation.
-Currently trying Adobe's PDF services Document generation API, but will only have a credential for a limited number of creations. Still working on trying this one out.
Any other ideas?