Power BI Image URLs from Tenant-Secured SharePoint – Intermittent Rendering Issues

[JoeHeraty]

Hi everyone,

I’m experiencing ongoing issues with displaying image URLs in Power BI reports and apps, and I’m struggling to identify a reliable solution.

Context

• We store employee/user headshots as image URLs in a user lookup table within the models.

• These images are used across multiple reports for UI elements such as:

  • Logged-in user icons

  • Employee of the Month visuals

  • Leaderboards and other internal dashboards

• The images are hosted in a company SharePoint folder maintained by our Marketing team.

• All employees have view permissions to this SharePoint location (not anonymous access).

Issue 1 – Power BI Service / Teams

• When opening reports in Power BI Service or via Teams, some images load correctly while others appear as broken image links.

• If I manually open the SharePoint image folder in my browser (authenticating via our tenant) and then refresh the report, the images display correctly.

• However, this only persists temporarily, typically by the next day the images are broken again.

• This makes me suspect an authentication, cookie, or caching issue rather than an issue with the URLs themselves.

Issue 2 – Digital Signage

• We also surface these reports via a digital signage solution on screens around multiple offices.

• In this scenario, none of the SharePoint-hosted images render, they consistently show as broken links.

• Interestingly, the images display correctly in the digital signage platform’s preview, but fail once pushed to the physical screens.

• My assumption here is that the signage devices do not have the required authentication context (cookies / tokens) to access tenant-secured SharePoint images.

Question
Has anyone encountered similar behaviour when using SharePoint-hosted image URLs in Power BI?

• Is there a known or recommended approach for handling image authentication/caching issues like this?

• Are there better-practice alternatives for hosting images used in Power BI (especially for digital signage scenarios)?

• Would a different hosting method (e.g. public blob storage, CDN, base64 encoding, etc.) be more appropriate?

Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, as I’ve struggled to find clear documentation or examples covering this use case.

Thanks in advance.

[v-nmadadi-msft]

Hi @JoeHeraty 

May I check if this issue has been resolved? If not, Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.

Thank you

[v-nmadadi-msft]

Hi @JoeHeraty 

I wanted to check if you had the opportunity to review the valuable information provided by @tayloramy . Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.

Thank you.

[Mauro89]

Hi @JoeHeraty,

there are couple of resouces regarding this topic and other options.
I could imagine some of them might be a good solution for you.

The BEST way to add IMAGES from OneDrive & SharePoint in Power BI

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGKykytzLXs&t

Best regards!

PS: If you find this post helpful consider leaving kudos or mark it as solution

[JoeHeraty]

Hi Mauro,

Thanks for getting back to me!  I'm stuck at creating the shareable link.  When I go to share the image I only have 3 options: People in Organisation, people with existing access and people I choose.  I select "people I choose" as it states I can share inside or outside our organisation, but it wont let me copy the link, I have to provide and email, username, or group.  There is no "Anyone with the link"

The Right Way to Create a Shareable Image Link

Here is how to generate a link that works for everyone, including external users:

1. Right-click the image and click "Share"
2. Make sure the link is set so that "Anyone with the link" can access it
3. Copy the link
4. Remove everything after the question mark in the URL
5. Add ?download=1 at the end

[tayloramy]

Hi @JoeHeraty, 

That means that your OneDrive/SharePoint admin has disabled the ability to create public links, which is pretty standard to protect organizational data and prevent missharing. 

Can you contact your admin and explain your use case to see if they will enable that for you? 

If you found this helpful, consider giving some Kudos. If I answered your question or solved your problem, mark this post as the solution. 

[JoeHeraty]

Hi Taylor, 

Thanks for the response.  After speaking with our tennant admin we can only create sharepoint sites that can be sharing within our domain.  We're going to test hosting the images on another server that is accessible.  I will let this thread know if our solution works

Thanks!
Joe