How to use Images Stored in a SQL Server Table with Power BI

 Power BI has several options to display images in a report or dashboard but they mostly require that the image is a url to a publicly accessible website.    What I'll show you in this post is a way to take images stored in a database and bind them to a table visualization.   This will work with lots of visuals that display images.   My use case was to display chart images generated from R using SQL Server's Machine Learning Server

@Meagan Longoria recently introduced me a great article from @SQLJason Embedding Images in Power BI using Base64.   This gave me all the information I needed to look at solution to bind image data stored in a SQL Server table.   

Definitely read SqlJason's article, paying close attention to limitations etc.  This solution is meant for relatively small images you would show in a report.  If you use it for large images it will likely fail.  Reduce the resolution in those cases.

Getting images into SQL Server

 Go to your favorite SQL Server and create a table and insert some images.  Here's my sample code to give you one way you can get images into a database table

--CREATE Table Logo
--(
--    LogoId int,
--    LogoName varchar(255),
--    LogoImage image
--)

INSERT INTO dbo.Logo
( 
  LogoId,
  LogoName,
  LogoImage
)  
SELECT  1,'Power BI',  
      * FROM OPENROWSET  
      ( BULK 'C:\Users\me\Desktop\LogoDemo\powerbi.png',SINGLE_CLOB)  as ImageFile

INSERT INTO dbo.Logo
( 
  LogoId,
  LogoName,
  LogoImage
)  
SELECT  2,'Azure',  
      * FROM OPENROWSET  
      ( BULK 'C:\Users\me\Desktop\LogoDemo\azure.png',SINGLE_CLOB)  as ImageFile

INSERT INTO dbo.Logo
( 
  LogoId,
  LogoName,
  LogoImage
)  
SELECT  3,'Microsoft',  
      * FROM OPENROWSET  
      ( BULK 'C:\Users\me\Desktop\LogoDemo\microsoft.png',SINGLE_CLOB)  as ImageFile

Get the image data using Power BI Desktop

Now that you have some images in a SQL table, switch over to Power BI Desktop and get the data.
(In Desktop:  Get Data, SQL Server, Login to your SQL Server, and pick your table that stores images. 

Change the binary column to Text

Now create a custom column and append a URI to tell Power BI these are png images.   If using jpeg use jpeg instead of png.

Close & Apply the data.

This is an important step. In the Modeling tab, change the image column ([Logo]) to a  Data Category of Image URL.

Now you can use a visuals, like a table, and display your images that came from a SQL Server vs. having to find a way to store images on a public internet site.   

I hope this works for you like it did for me.