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