Enable attachments

You must first enable attachments on a feature class or table before being able to associate attachments with a feature or row. Enabling attachments creates a stand-alone table to store the media that will be attached and a one-to-many relationship class to manage the association between the media and the feature class or table. Attachments are related to their assigned feature using a unique ID, such as the Object ID value in a feature class attribute table.

You can enable a feature class or table for attachments using the Catalog pane or the Enable Attachments geoprocessing tool. Both workflows are described below.

Enable attachments using the Catalog pane

To enable attachments from a dataset in the Catalog pane, complete the following steps:

1. Right-click a dataset in a geodatabase in the Catalog pane and choose Manage.

   

2. In the Feature Class Properties window, check Attachments.

   

   Global IDs is checked by default, and it is recommended that you leave it checked.

3. Click OK to enable the dataset.

Learn more about recommendations for global IDs

Enable attachments using the Enable Attachments geoprocessing tool

To enable attachments on a feature class or table using the Enable Attachments geoprocessing tool, complete the following steps:

1. On the Analysis tab in the Geoprocessing group, click Tools.
2. Search for or browse to the Enable Attachments tool in the Data Management Tools toolset, and click the Enable Attachments search result to open the tool.

   

   The Enable Attachments dialog box appears with a single parameter to populate with the input dataset.

   

3. For Input Dataset, use the browse button to select a feature class or table, or click the down arrow to choose a dataset from the active map.
4. Click Run to enable the dataset for attachments.

Both workflows create a stand-alone table to store all attachments and a one-to-many relationship class to manage the association between the stand-alone table and the input dataset.

The attachment table is identified by having the same name as the enabled dataset with an appending double underscore and the suffix ATTACH. The associated relationship class name also has the name of the dataset with an appending double underscore and the suffix ATTACHREL.

With the dataset enabled for attachments, add them one at a time to the dataset during an edit session or bulk load many-to-one or more features using the Add Attachments geoprocessing tool.