Retrieve user photo from Salesforce into Power BI?

[anktaggrwl]

I'm trying to retrieve user's profile photos from Salesforce and pull them into some Power BI reports.

I have an image url that points to: 

https://mycompaniesinstance.salesforce.com/profilephoto/72936000000JuYa/F

and when I paste the url into a browser, the image is retrieved just fine, but when changing the data type to 'image url' in a report, and putting the image into a visual... i just get:

Has anyone successfully pulled in a profile photo from Salesforce into Power BI? If so, please share! 🙂

[v-yulgu-msft]

Hi @anktaggrwl,

Can those photos be accessed anonymously?

Regards,

Yuliana Gu

[anktaggrwl]

Good point, they cannot. But I am authenticated to Salesforce and am using my credentials to pull everything else - is there not a way to download/preload the images instead of calling them as needed in a visual?

[danextian · Accepted solution]

Hi @anktaggrwl,

I've had the same question before but never bothered to ask for possible solution as adding the images to my report was not necessary. One thing I've realized in my recent Power BI report developments is that if access to something requires authentication, you may not be able to view it in Power BI desktop even if its category has been set to image URL. It could be because PBI desktop is using IE/Edge and you authenticated to SFDC using a different browser. That being said, try uploading a dummy report containing the image URL to your own workspace and edit that report in the service. Then check whether the images render but  make sure you've authenticated already authenticated.

[anktaggrwl]

@danextian SUCCESS!!

It makes sense that you'd have authentication passed based on the user logging into the report for the images - and since all of my users would naturally be authenticated via their own credientails and SSO into Salesforce in our org - it looks like the images work on the service, and I assume the user that is accessing the report has his/her credentials passed to SFDC when the images are retrieved as they view the report.

[danextian]

Hi @anktaggrwl

I'm glad it worked.

I realized about this when I was trying to connect to images in a sharepoint folder. 

[Greg_Deckler]

When you paste it into a web browser, are you authenticated to Salesforce?