Using Azure Blob Storage to serve Photos in Power BI by way of a URL

[Anonymous]

Hello Community,

I am trying to use images stored in a Azure Blob storage to display in my Power BI report.

Currently our team is using images stored in SharePoint to accomplish this, using the SharePoint URL along with a Power BI visual, Image by CloudScope. This works well.

Because of the amount of photos being generated we needed to switch to a differnt storge method, Azure Blob storge was a good fit for us.

After connecting to to the storage, we tried to use the URI from the table but with no success, seeing this error each time.

The URI is https://ourname.blob.core.windows.net/ourfoldername/ourpicturename

Our question is, are there any solutions that create an acceptable URL pointing to the Blob storage that will work in the same manner the the SharePoint URL works?

Any thoughts on the topic are welcome.

[v-lid-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Have you tried to set the Data Category as Image URL? It looks like power bi cannot get data from this URI. Can you get image from your url in browser? You can get more information about how to show picture from blob storage in this blog and this thread.

Best regards,

Community Support Team _ Dong Li
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@v-lid-msft ,

I was able to reach a solution to this by merging the "folder path" and "name" columns then attaching an SAS string (created from Azure for the folder all the images are in) to the end. This appoarch created a usable URL path.

[Folder Path]&[Name]&"SASstringHere"

[ericOnline]

Hm... there is a security issue with this method, right? If the image URL leaks, the image will be visible for anyone until the SAS token expires. 

How are you appending a fresh, short-lived SAS token to each image?

Thank you