How to Use Pictures in Your Power BI Power View Dashboards

If you used pictures in your Power View dashboards and tried to deploy these dashboards in your Power BI tenant you are likely to have seen the following warning message:

“UNSUPPORTED FEATURES External pictures can’t be displayed in Power View Sheets in Office 365”. My guess it’s only a matter of time when external pictures are treated with respect by Power BI, however, in the meanwhile, I wanted to write about a workaround that will alleviate some of the pain caused by this inconvenient lack of support.

Unfortunately, the workaround is not a good fit for a self-service use case as it requires an instance of SQL Server database and some SQL writing skills.

The first step is to create a table that will house your images:

CREATE
TABLE [dbo].[Something](

    [ID] [int] NULL,

    [SomethingDesc] [nvarchar](100)
NULL,

    [ImageOfSomething] [varbinary](max)
NULL

)
ON [PRIMARY] TEXTIMAGE_ON [PRIMARY]

Now, assuming you have the ID and SomethingDesc fields already populated, you need to load the images for each record of something. A sample SQL to do that will look something like this:

update Something set ImageOfSomething = (SELECT image_data FROM OPENROWSET(BULK N’C:\SomethigID1.jpg’, SINGLE_BLOB) AS ImageSource(image_data)) where ID =1

update Something set ImageOfSomething = (SELECT image_data FROM OPENROWSET(BULK N’C:\SomethigID2.jpg’, SINGLE_BLOB) AS ImageSource(image_data)) where ID =2

etc…

Now that the images are loaded in your SQL table, they can be pulled into your Power Pivot model just like a regular field. It is probably a good idea to then go to the Advanced tab in your Power Pivot window and make sure the Data Category for the image field is set as Image

And the Default Image is set correctly in the Table Behavior screen.

Now you can use Images for visualizations as described in this article, deploy your dashboards to your Power BI site and enjoy the enhanced visualization mojo.