The Scenario
The web team is rebuilding the gallery section of a destination marketing organization's site. They asked you for a spreadsheet with the top five Tripadvisor photo URLs for each of 20 featured attractions — original size, captions if available, photographer credits. They want it by end of week so the developer can start populating the staging environment.
You are the digital content coordinator. You have the 20 attraction location IDs in a sheet. You have Tripadvisor API access. What you do not have is a quick way to run through 20 locations and extract photo metadata without doing it one call at a time.
The bad version:
- Write an API call for the first location ID, get the photo array, pull out the five largest-size URLs, note the captions and photographer usernames
- Format all of that into the sheet — five URLs spread across five columns, captions in the next five, usernames in the five after that
- Get to location seven, realize you have been pulling medium-size URLs rather than original-size URLs, go back and redo locations one through six
The developer is blocked on the gallery build until this lands. Spending three hours on API calls and reformatting is not a reasonable use of a day that already has three other deliverables in it.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your column of location IDs, hits the Tripadvisor photos endpoint for each one, and writes the original-size URLs, captions, and photographer credits directly into your sheet — laid out exactly as you ask.
Here is the prompt for this specific task:
For each TripAdvisor location ID in column A, fetch up to 5 photos and write the original-size image URL, caption, and photographer username into columns B, C, and D for each photo
What You Get
- For each location ID in column A: up to 5 photo records written into the adjacent columns
- Column B: Original-size photo URL
- Column C: Caption text (blank if none exists)
- Column D: Photographer username
- Locations with fewer than 5 photos stop at whatever is available — no blank padding by default
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want photos laid out one per row rather than across columns
For each TripAdvisor location ID in column A, fetch up to 5 photos and write each photo as its own row in the Photos tab — columns for location ID, attraction name, photo rank, original-size URL, caption, and photographer username
You want large-size URLs instead of original-size, with blanks for missing photos
Get the TripAdvisor photos for each location ID in column A and write the large-size photo URLs into columns B through F, leaving the cell blank for any location with fewer than 5 photos
Some location IDs may be stale — you want to skip ones that return no photos rather than erroring
For each location ID in column A, fetch up to 5 TripAdvisor photos, skip any location that returns zero photos and note "no photos" in column B for that row, and for locations with photos write the original-size URL and caption into columns B and C for each photo
You want the photo pull plus a column indicating which photos already appear on the site
For each TripAdvisor location ID in column A, fetch up to 5 original-size photo URLs and write them into columns B through F, then for each URL check whether it appears in the ExistingAssets tab column A and write "existing" or "new" into the corresponding Status columns
Combining the retrieval with a lookup against what you already have gives you a gallery asset sheet the developer can actually use without a second pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet where your attraction location IDs live, then ask it to pull the top 5 photo URLs, captions, and photographer credits for each one. You can also ask it to pull full location details for the same list or to fetch bookable activities for the destinations these attractions belong to.