Connecting photographs

[Anonymous]

Newbie here and due to go on my first Power BI training course in May - super excited as Power BI looks like it has SO much potential.  We have a bunch of reports built for us and the advantages are mind blowing already!

One thing I have tried is creating a MS form in teams for my team to submit a monthly project update.  As part of this they upload a photograph each month.

When I get the excel download with the hyperlinks to the photographs, Power BI will not pick up the links to the photos.

After some intense googling (that is a real thing lol) I realised that Power BI will only pick up an image URL if the image is on the world wide web and open to anyone.

I tested this with some random images and it worked. (using the visual Image Pro by Cloud Scope)

So my question - is there any way to get Power BI to pick up photographs with the URL in a secure area?  We cannot have our photographs out there on the web so am looking to find an alternative and having no luck.

Any ideas or is this just a no-no?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

The answer to this is you cannot connect photographs to Power BI unless they are in an open access area.  For our business this is not possible as we cannot hold any business content in the open web.

[Anonymous]

Hi Gao - thank you for your reply.  I scanned the blog you mentioned and it is beyond my level for now.  It also looks from that blog that what I am trying to do is not possible.

I wanted to have a monthly report updated through Teams Forms and then connect to Power BI but from reading the blog it looks like I would need to manipulate every single URL and compress every single file every month.  As there will be about a number of photo updates every month this will take up too much time.

Shame as I think it would be really cool.

Maybe down the line once I am more experienced I will have another go 🙂

Have a great weekend.

Warm Rgds

Yvonne

[v-cgao-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

You can convert images to Base64 for storage in tables in PowerBI. Please refer to blogs in this link.

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Storing Large Images In Power BI Datasets

Best Regards,
Gao
Community Support Team

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