How can I show Office 365 User Profile pictures in Power BI?

[Anonymous]

I want to create a report that shows users in my tenant along with their profile pictures. This is really easy in Power Apps, but I cannot find a solution in Power BI. How can I go about fetching that data?

[Anonymous]

I know this is from forever ago, but I want to volunteer that you can actually get profile photos if your staff log into SharePoint in O365. On first login, their user info including profile image URL is dumped into a hidden SP list called the "UserInformationList" that also contains other O365 profile data. This can be accessed using the SharePoint Online list source.

It's notable that because the images are not publicly hosted, PBI desktop displays a broken image link when you're creating the report, but once it's published to the web app it will resolve the thumbnail images.

[hansei]

@Anonymous, can you elaborate on this? In UserInformationList, I find a URL in the field [Picture][Url], but it is a OneDrive URL (i.e. https://*-my.sharepoint.com:443/*) and resolves to nothing in PBI service. Are you using a different field?

[Anonymous]

Yes, that's the one. It's not in a particular user's OneDrive, it's in some kind of shared space, so access shouldn't be an issue. Did you set the field type to image URL in the desktop? It did work for me, though I have since removed it as I'm finding it causes some kind of weird throttling errors in O365 occasionally (this may be dependent on how many it's retrieving at once or something? not sure). 

[edhans]

Unfortunately I do not believe you can do this Power BI doesn't have the connection to user profiles like Power Apps does. Best thing I can think of is to use Power Apps to extract the image files and store them in a location like Azure Blob Storage where Power BI can access them via URL. That would be a question for the Power Apps folks in their forum.