How to Add Image URL in Power BI

Adding images to a Power BI report can instantly transform it from a wall of numbers into a clear, engaging, and professional-looking dashboard. Whether you want to show product photos next to sales data, country flags for regional breakdowns, or employee headshots in a team directory, using images makes your data much easier to understand at a glance. This guide will walk you through the simple process of using image URLs to bring your Power BI reports to life.

Why Bother with Images in Your Reports?

Before jumping into the "how," let's briefly touch on the "why." Numbers and text are the foundation of any report, but visuals are what make the story stick. Here’s what images bring to the table:

• Better Context: Seeing a picture of the "Ergonomic Office Chair" next to its sales figures is more impactful than just reading the product name. Images provide immediate context that text alone can't.
• Increased Engagement: A visually appealing report is more likely to be read and used. Bright, relevant images grab attention and make your dashboard less intimidating and more inviting for stakeholders.
• Faster Comprehension: Our brains process images significantly faster than text. When you include flags in a geographical report or logos for different brands, your audience can spot patterns and identify categories almost instantly.

In short, adding images isn't just about making your reports look pretty, it's about making them more effective communication tools.

Step 1: Get Your Image URLs Ready

The first and most critical step is preparing your image URLs. Power BI doesn't store the images themselves within the report file. Instead, it pulls them live from a web address whenever you view the report. This means your URLs have a few important requirements.

What is a Valid Image URL for Power BI?

An image URL is a web link that points directly to an image file (like a .jpg, .png, or .gif) on the internet. For Power BI to display it correctly, the URL must be:

• Publicly Accessible: This is the most common stumbling block. Publicly accessible means anyone with the link can view the image in their web browser without needing to log in or pass through any security checks. A simple test is to open your browser’s incognito or private mode and paste the URL. If the image loads, Power BI can likely access it. If it asks you to sign in or shows an error, it won’t work.
• Pointing to an Image File: The URL must end in a recognized image file extension, such as .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .bmp, or .svg. Links to web pages that contain an image, rather than the image file itself, will not work.

Where to Host Your Images

If you don’t already have your images hosted online, here are a few options:

• Your Company's Website: If your company has a public website, you can often upload images to its media library and use the direct links. This is a great professional option.
• Cloud Storage (Public Buckets): Services like Azure Blob Storage, Amazon S3, or Google Cloud Storage can host files. You just need to configure the files or the "bucket" they're in to be publicly accessible.
• SharePoint Online: This can be a bit tricky. While it's possible to use SharePoint-hosted images, you need to ensure the links are "guest" or anonymous access links. Standard internal links that require a login usually won't work in Power BI Service.
• Public Image Hosting Services: For personal projects or practice, you can use a service like Imgur. Just be mindful of their terms of service and remember that anyone with the link can see your images.

Step 2: Set the Data Category in Power BI Desktop

Once you have a column of valid, publicly accessible image URLs in your data source (like an Excel file, Google Sheet, or SQL database), you can bring it into Power BI. From there, you just need to tell Power BI that this column of text isn't just text - it's a collection of links to images.

This is the most important step in the entire process. Here’s how you do it:

1. Load Your Data: Open Power BI Desktop and load your dataset using Get Data. Make sure the table you load includes the column containing your full image URLs.
2. Go to the Data View: On the left-hand side of the Power BI window, click on the Data view icon (it looks like a small table).
3. Select Your URL Column: In the Fields pane on the right, find your table and click on the column that contains your image URLs. This will highlight the entire column in the data grid.
4. Find the Column Tools: With the column selected, a new contextual tab called Column tools will appear in the top ribbon.
5. Set the Data Category: In the Column tools ribbon, look for the Properties group. Here, you'll see a dropdown menu labeled Data category, which is probably set to "Uncategorized."
6. Click the Data category dropdown and select Image URL from the list.

That's it! You have now instructed Power BI to treat every value in this column as a link to a web image. You won't see any immediate change in the data grid, but now you're ready to use these images in your visuals.

Step 3: Add the Images to Your Report Visuals

With the data category correctly set, you can now display your images in several types of visuals.

Using a Table or Matrix Visual

The simplest way to display a list of items with their corresponding images is by using a Table or Matrix.

1. Return to the Report view (the first icon on the left).
2. Add a Table visual to your report canvas from the Visualizations pane.
3. From your Fields pane, drag and drop the fields you want to display into the "Columns" area of the visual. For example, you might add 'Product Name' and 'Sales'.
4. Now, drag your specially-configured image URL field into the same "Columns" area. Power BI will automatically recognize the data category and display the actual images instead of the text URLs.

Tip: Adjusting Image Size in a Table

By default, the images might be too small. You can easily adjust their size:

• Select the Table visual.
• Go to the Format pane (the paintbrush icon).
• Expand the Grid section.
• Find the Image size option and increase the height and width in pixels until the images look right.

Using Images in Slicers and Cards

You can also use images to create more intuitive slicers or dynamic cards that show an image based on a selection. For this, native visuals are sometimes limited, and you'll get the best results with custom visuals from AppSource.

One popular choice is the Chiclet Slicer for creating button-like filters with images. Another is the Simple Image visual, which is perfect for displaying a single image that changes based on what you select in other visuals.

To add one, go to the Visualizations pane, click the three dots (...), select Get more visuals, and search for the one you need.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

If your images aren't showing up, here are a few things to check:

1. Are the URLs truly public? Copy one of the URLs from your data table and paste it into a private/incognito browser window. If it doesn't load there, it won't load in Power BI. This is often the cause of the problem.
2. Is the Data Category set correctly? Double-check that the column is set to Image URL in the Column tools ribbon. If you see the text of the URLs in your table instead of images, this is likely the issue.
3. Are the URLs complete? Make sure there are no missing parts (like the https:// prefix) and no extra characters or spaces at the beginning or end of your URLs. You can use the Power Query Editor to trim and clean your data if needed.
4. Report Performance is Slow: If your report is loading slowly after adding images, it might be due to a large number of high-resolution images. It's best practice to resize your images to a web-friendly size before uploading them to your host. Power BI has to load every single one of them, and smaller files will load much faster.

Final Thoughts

Incorporating dynamic images into your Power BI reports is a straightforward and powerful way to elevate your dashboards. The key is ensuring your images are hosted publicly and then simply toggling the Data Category to 'Image URL' within Power BI. Once set up, you can build more engaging and insightful visuals that help your team understand performance at a glance.

While mastering tools like Power BI is incredibly rewarding, we know that the work doesn't stop there. Marketers and sales teams often spend hours bouncing between a dozen different platforms just to pull the data together. At Graphed, we are building a more intuitive way to get answers from all your data. By connecting your sources directly to our platform, you can skip the manual exporting and BI setup and just ask questions in plain English to build real-time dashboards instantly. This way, you can get back to acting on insights instead of just hunting them down.