The Scenario
Your travel content team is building a destination guide campaign. Someone compiled 80 venue FSQ IDs into a Google Sheet — hotels, restaurants, and attractions across three cities. The campaign brief calls for one primary photo per venue to preview before the creative team selects final images. Right now, column B is a long stretch of empty cells, and the launch timeline is two weeks out.
The content manager asked you to fill it. "Just grab the photo URLs from Foursquare."
The bad version:
- Open the Foursquare API docs, figure out the photo endpoint, run a request for each FSQ ID, find the photo URL buried in the response JSON, and paste it into column B
- Realize the photo endpoint returns an array of photo objects and you have to reconstruct the full URL from prefix + suffix fields — which is not documented clearly and costs you an extra hour
- Get through 20 venues before a meeting pulls you away, come back to a cold browser session, and start making mistakes on which row you left off
Your job title does not include "API integration engineer." You are a content person. This should have taken 10 minutes.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It knows the Foursquare photo endpoint, handles the URL reconstruction from prefix and suffix fields, and writes the final URLs into your sheet — no API docs, no JSON parsing.
For each Foursquare FSQ ID in column A, fetch the first available venue photo and write the full photo URL into column B
What You Get
- Column B populated with a direct photo URL for each FSQ ID where Foursquare has photos
- URLs are fully resolved — no prefix/suffix assembly needed on your end
- Venues with no photos receive "No photo available" in column B so you can spot gaps immediately rather than finding blank cells
- The creative team can open the sheet and preview images without any intermediary steps
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The brief changed — creative wants up to 3 photo options per venue to choose from
For each Foursquare FSQ ID in column A, fetch up to 3 venue photos and write the URLs into columns B, C, and D. Leave a column blank if fewer than 3 photos exist
Some FSQ IDs in column A are blank — skip those rows and only fetch where an ID exists
For rows where column A contains a Foursquare FSQ ID, fetch the first available venue photo and write the URL into column B. Skip rows where column A is empty
The campaign is split by city — fetch photos for each city tab and write a summary count of venues with photos into the Campaign Overview sheet
For each sheet tab named after a city, fetch the first available Foursquare photo for each FSQ ID in column A and write the URL into column B. Then write a row in the Campaign Overview sheet with the city name and the count of venues that returned a photo
Pull 3 photos per venue, flag any venue with fewer than 2 photos as "Low asset coverage" for the creative director's review, and sort flagged rows to the top
For each Foursquare FSQ ID in column A, fetch up to 3 venue photos and write the URLs into columns B, C, and D. Flag any venue with fewer than 2 photos in column E as "Low asset coverage," then sort the sheet so flagged rows appear first
Combining the fetch, the flag, and the sort in one prompt means the creative director gets a prioritized list without a separate pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with a column of Foursquare FSQ IDs, then ask it to fetch venue photo URLs and populate your asset sheet. Also worth reading: Pull Foursquare Venue Tips for Qualitative Analysis and the Foursquare hub overview.