I found out that exporting images from a FileMaker database is a major pain. Here’s what I came up with, I’d be interested to hear about better ways to do this.

Sice FileMaker’s export commands cannot export the container fields used to hold image fields, the goal is to get an XML export of the regular data and a bunch of image files in a directory. The filenames must correspond to some key field in the database so that the exported records can be linked with their images.

To export the images automatically from a FileMaker script, I had to combine FileMaker scripting, AppleScript and shell scripting.

The core of the solution is to use the clipboard to get at the image data:

• iterate through the records
• copy the content of the image container field to the clipboard
• use the AppleScript file manipulation functions to open a file
• write the clipboard contents to the file
• close the file
• move the file to the destination directory with a unique filename determined by a DB field

A difficult part is that the image filename is different for every record so the AppleScript code is dynamic and must be generated in a FileMaker script expression. The generated AppleScript code itself uses shell commands so there are three levels of quoting.

Another issue is that the code that writes the clipboard contents to the file worked fine in Script Debugger, but when used unchanged in FileMaker, FileMaker complained about the write to file command. Turns out that there is a clash because the write verb seems to mean something different in the context of AppleScript running inside FileMaker. I had to work around the issue by using the raw chevron AppleScript syntax for that line.

Here’s the native AppleScript for writing the image to a file:

Here’s the calculation expression to dynamically generate the AppleScript for moving the image to its final destination:

Wow, how FileMaker still sucks after all these years... It’s insane what has to be done to get something so easy to work.