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Showing Images in Power BI

Teo Lachev hits on an annoyance I have with Power BI:

The Power BI image-rendering visualizations, such as Table or Card, expect image links to public servers hosting the images with anonymous permissions. This has obvious shortcomings. Can we load images from a database or Power BI data table? You bet, as Jason Thomas has demonstrated a long time ago. Here are the steps I followed to show the images from the Production.ProductPhoto table in the AdventureWorks2012 (or later) database. If you want to embed a few images into a Power BI data table (instead of an external database), you can convert them manually to Base64 using any of the online image converters, such as https://codebeautify.org/image-to-base64-converter and embed the resulting string into a Power BI data table (the Enter Data feature). Gerhard Brueckl takes this one step further by showing you how to automate the base64 conversion with many images.

The experience for displaying images isn’t the worst—I don’t mind needing base64 encoded strings for images—but there’s a strict limit on how large your images can be, and that size is puny. I have one dashboard where I show a CPU chart from Grafana and I have to leave it at a very small resolution or else I don’t get to see the whole chart—it cuts off in the middle.