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mjfulke's avatar
mjfulke
Microsoft Employee
8 years ago
Solved

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 ...
Tips and Tricks
andy_scott42's avatar
andy_scott42
Helper II
7 years ago

I've found that the maximum length a string can have to be processed by Power BI is 32766 characters.

So once you've converted your image to a Base64 string, if the length of the string is greater than this then it will crop the image.

 

admin_xlsior's avatar
admin_xlsior
Post Prodigy
7 years ago

 Hi, I tried same step, and count the character is 1024, but still it is display as broken image. My image is png.

 

However by look at the character length, I'm not sure whether it is correct, or somehow during convert to text it is truncated ? because quite weird that all in the same length.

 

 

  • cymorg's avatar
    cymorg
    Resolver I
    7 years ago

    I gave up on this because I need large/high res. images.  An alternative approach was to write the images to temp. files on disk and insert a link to these in my dataset.  Seems like PowerBI only supports small icon type images out of the box.  Ces't la vie.

  • mjfulke's avatar
    mjfulke
    Microsoft Employee
    7 years ago

    Sounds like the length of the datatype you're using ends at 1024.  Look at varchar(max)

    • admin_xlsior's avatar
      admin_xlsior
      Post Prodigy
      7 years ago

      Sorry, I copy it to Excel and use Len function, not sure why it is give me that 1024. 

      But I add a Calculated Column directly in Power BI in the same table, turns out it gives me what I think the correct length.

       

      Some variance of length shows, but not exceed 32677, yet it doesn't show me the image instead a broken image icon.

       

      Thinking of giving up as well. :(