[General Questions and Answers] 1scotch469:
Why are forums so useless these days?

Three days of reading. That is time I will never get back. I am at wits end. Either I am the first to ever try this (pretty doubtful, I am not a developer and hardly on the cutting edge) or.... The system is broken.

Also I have now spent almost four hours today reading posts about how and when to post where and what the rules are. I am no more clear about this forum it's proposed uses or rules. In fact now I am not sure I should post a question at all for fear of offending a moderator. The general volume of "read this first before posting" information is overwhelming, also a lot of it is contradicting. Finally, due to the volume of posts and questions and answers and non answers and chatter available, I have found that trying to search for or research a specific question or specific use case becomes an endless Odyssey into an abyss of irrelevance. Days I have spent reading, here and elsewhere Google has sent me, and I am no further towards understanding or solving my question.

This is all very frustrating and is making me hate forums in general. A once useful resource (memories of helpful forums back in 1999) have now become something much less. Are there really people out their in this day and age that consider a reply to a post detailing how to perform a Google search on the OP's topic question is "helpful"??? Or detailing what was found about the question on Google by the person replying?? How is that helpful either to the OP or for that matter to anyone else researching the same issue? How can a post be marked SOLVED when the solution was to read some other post about something else entirely? Also a mod telling a poster that the question is off topic is not a solution. This is a problem because when I later use search engines to research a similar issue I must spend hours and days and weeks wading through supposedly solved posts that do not address the issue at all. And pompous replies like "why would anyone try to/need to do that?" Are likewise less than helpful. What it all makes for is a broken system that hardly serves its purpose anymore. And generates irate rants like this one. Which likely won't change anything or help anyone and will only waste the time of whoever reads it.

---------- Post added at 05:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:21 PM ----------

The following was meant to be a separate post with a separate title.

I am looking for relevant information on how to use URIs in Tasker. Or one of it's plugins like the AutoApps Suite of tools. Or simple scripting to solve my specific use case.

Details of my specific question and use case:

I have a Google Sheet that is produced by another app over which I do not have control outside the provided UI. This sheet contains fields with device specific URIs from internal MediaManager (provided by the Android system). This manager returns device specific image URIs, like this:

content://com.android.providers.media.documents/document/image%3A19036

Which as far as I understand is a Uniform Resource Identifier and is a string of characters used to identify a resource. So in this case it references a specific image stored locally on my device.

I have a list of these generated by another app and stored in a Google sheet.

My goal is to use these URIs to upload those specific images to Google drive, in a specified folder, share the images and return the new shareable download URLs.

Ultimately I want to setup automation to retrieve the spreadsheet, copy the whole first worksheet to a second worksheet (so the app that generated it can still use it), retrieve URI from the second sheet, upload, share, return URL, replace URI on second sheet with new URL and do (loop) the same for the next URIs in the next columns and rows. The end product will be a spreadsheet with two worksheets, one original from the app that generated it and sheet2 with usable/clickable URLs instead of unusable URIs.

***************

For now i think my first step is to figure out how to use the device specific URIs as input for the upload.

***************

I hope this is clear. And I hope someone can help.

I am a big fan of the AutoApps Suite of tools and Tasker. I have some very basic JavaScript and VBscript knowledge from 17 years ago. I'm just really new to this new stuff.

If it helps I am using an LGG3 D852 Android 6.0 MM with latest updates of Tasker and AutoApps Suite. All full versions. No root ac cess.

BUT... I am looking for a universal not device specific solution. That is to say, I want the solution To work on other devices and platforms (with device specific URIs specific to (generated by) each device).

Thanks