Dynamic Images in Power BI Dashboards

Christopher Mortimer
Specialising in data
More posts by Christopher Mortimer.

Christopher Mortimer

17 Mar 2022•2 min read

Dynamic images in Power BI

Getting images to be dynamic, such as changing in reaction to an change in the selected value of a slicer seems to have limited out of the box solutions in Power BI (at the time of this blog).

The solutions I have seen involve sourcing the images from a URL (already hosted images). Which is fine if you have access to a webserver to host them, but if you don’t you may feel you are stuck.

Another way using HTML

If you don’t have access to a webserver to host your images, you can host the images as text in two ways.

The images

SVG

To demonstrate using SVGs I sourced some from Font Awesome.

Base64

To demonstrate using Base64 encoding I got a png of an emoji and used a Base64 Image converter to convert to Base64.

Database table

I will demo this using a MySQL database. SQL code from Github repository

DROP TABLE `powerbi_image`;
CREATE TABLE `powerbi_image` (
    `picture_id` int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT
    , `picture_name` varchar(100) NULL DEFAULT NULL
    , `picture_type` varchar(100) NULL DEFAULT NULL
    , `picture_source_code` longtext NULL DEFAULT NULL
    , PRIMARY KEY (`picture_id`)
  )
COLLATE='latin1_swedish_ci'
ENGINE=MyISAM
;

-- The full code containing the SVG and Base64 images
-- is in this associated repo which is linked above
INSERT INTO `powerbi_image`
  (`picture_name`, `picture_type`, `picture_source_code`)
  values
  ('smile', 'svg', '<html><svg><path d=""/></svg></html>')
  , ('icecream', 'svg', '<html><svg><path d=""/></svg></html>')
  , ('avocado', 'base64', '<html><img src="data:image/png;base64,"/></html>')
;