Pictures in table are not loaded (Instagram thumbnails)

[LinqLover]

Hi,

we have a report in which we want to show a list of instagram posts. Each of them should be pictured with a thumbnail of the post. Unfortunately, Power BI is unable to load the pictures from the Instagram URLs (whereas pictures from different sources work well). These URLs have been retrieved from the Instagram Graph API via the the Instagram oEmbed endpoint. Of course, the URLs work in different browsers and programs, including wget, just not in PBI.

Here is a minimum example:

The long instagram URL is: https://scontent-ber1-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e35/p1080x1080/176253348_457295648935303_1209...

"image url" is set to the data category "picture URL".

This is how the table visual looks like:

Same result in Power BI Online. In the Dev Console, I noticed a "net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_RESPONSE". In the problems tab, it says "Specify a more permissive Cross-Origin Resource Policy to prevent a resource from being blocked" because the cdninstagram.com server appends the cross-origin-resource-policy "same-origin" to its response.

What's the problem here? Is this a CORS problem? Is this a problem with Power BI or with the Instagram server?

Are there any possibilites to fix this issue, either on the PBI side, or on my end, or do I need to embed the pictures into the report? If the latter is the case, could you recommend me a better way than using data URIs?

Many thanks in advance,

Christoph

[v-stephen-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @LinqLover ,

If you can, you can use htmlViewer. The URL needs to be changed as

"<iframe width=""1000"" height=""1000"" src=""https://scontent-ber1-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e35/p1080x1080/176253348_457295648935303_1209235384657112558_n.jpg?tp=1&_nc_ht=scontent-ber1-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=1&_nc_ohc=50yFEaLY8a8AX9nnfXz&edm=AABBvjUBAAAA&ccb=7-4&oh=4acc6019dbab5307cd324f6acfc6606f&oe=60A57711&_nc_sid=83d603""></iframe>"

After publishing to Power BI Service, you can see the picture.

https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZGIyMDZlMmYtYzEwZi00ODViLWJlNmMtN2NlZDFlMzU4ZmM1IiwidCI6ImNkM...

Best Regards,

Stephen Tao

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[amitchandak]

@LinqLover , refer this answer

https://www.quora.com/How-does-one-obtain-the-URL-to-an-Instagram-picture-that-he-she-took-without-p...

I tried one such solution in past, it worked for some time and then stop displaying again

https://nono.ma/get-instagram-image-url

[LinqLover]

@amitchandak, thanks for the pointer. As the URL signatures are now expired, I wonder whether the same could also happen to my links from above. In this case, it would not be useful at all to store the links but rather I would have to either download the images or to access the Instagram API directly from the report to make sure to receive fresh URLs. I will be considering both approaches ...