Google Suite - Apps Script - Download Slides as PNG files via API

Question

Good Morning All. I have written a short script which batch-creates [single page] Google Slides based on rows from a spreadsheet. While in the loop for each creation, I would

Answer 1

This answer is outdated, leaving up for documentation purposes but please see other answer.

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Answer:

Unfortunately it is not possible to export a Slides as a PNG file using the the Slides nor Drive APIs.

More Information:

According to the documentation, there are only four available MimeTypes for exporting Presentations files:

• application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation
• application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation
• application/pdf
• text/plain

Attempting to export to the image/png MIME Type results in the following error:

Converting from text/html to image/png is not supported

For testing purposes, I tried using the /export/pdf endpoint and making a second conversion to PNG from there like so:

function slidesAsPngAttempt() {
  var presentationCopyId = "1Loa...pQs";  
  var options =
      {
        "contentType" : "application/pdf"
      };
  // for exporting to pdf the /export/pdf needs to be all lower case to avoid 404
  var url = 'https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/' + presentationCopyId + '/export/pdf';  
  var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url, options);
  var pdfAsblob = response.getBlob();
 
  var image = pdfAsblob.getAs('image/png');
  
  image.setName(DriveApp.getFileById(presentationCopyId).getName());
  DriveApp.createFile(image);  
}

Unfortunately, a similar error occurs when running var image = pdfAsblob.getAs('image/png'):

Converting from application/pdf to image/png is not supported.

From the same export MIME types reference documentation, the only export types available for PDF files are:

• text/csv
• text/tab-separated-values
• application/zip

So unfortunately, this isn't possible. I know this is generally bad news, but I hope this is helpful to you!

References:

• G Suite documents and corresponding export MIME types
• Google Apps Script - method Blob.getAs(contentType)