Using Images from External Websites

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External Images in SSRS Reports Part one of a two-part series of blogs
In an SSRS report you can display images stored in an external location. This blog explains how to show images from both the report server and external websites in your SSRS reports. Using Images from External Websites (this blog) Using Images from the Report Server

External Images in SSRS Reports

Part one of a two-part series of blogs

In an SSRS report you can display images stored in an external location. This blog explains how to show images from both the report server and external websites in your SSRS reports.

Using Images from External Websites (this blog)
Using Images from the Report Server

Posted by Andrew Gould on 09 December 2024

In this blog

Finding Image URLs
Configuring an Image Report Item
What's the Problem?

In an SSRS report you can display images from an external website. In the example below, we're displaying a list of films along with an image of the BBFC certificate awarded to each film:

External images displayed in an SSRS report

The certificate logos shown here are stored in an external website.

Finding Image URLs

To display an external image, you need to provide its URL. One way to find this is to inspect the image in a web browser. Here's how to do this in Google Chrome:

Inspecting an image in a website in Google Chrome

Right-click the image and choose Inspect.

Doing this allows you to see the HTML code of the webpage. You can use this to find the source URL of the image:

Finding the URL of a web image in Google Chrome.

Look for the src attribute of the img element to see the URL of the image.

It's a good idea to store the URL of each image in your database. In the example below we've stored the URLs for six certificate logos:

Image URLs stored in a SQL Server database

Note that we've stored the full URL of each image.

Configuring an Image Report Item

To display the external images in a report, create a Report Server project using Visual Studio and add a report to the project. In the report, create a dataset which includes the image URL.

An SSRS dataset including a column with an image URL

This dataset includes a field containing the image URL.

You can't display external website images in Report Builder so, if you want to see your images when designing your reports, make sure you use Visual Studio.

Next, we'll create a table to show a row for each film and insert an image into one of the table columns.

Inserting an image into an SSRS table in Visual Studio 2022

Right-click on a cell in the table and choose Insert | Image.

In the dialog box which appears, you can configure which image will be displayed.

Configuring an image report item to display an external image in SSRS

Set the image source to External and then select the field containing the image URL.

Click OK to confirm your choices.

An SSRS table with an image in deign view.

This is what the table should look like in design view.

When you preview the report, you should see your linked images.

External images displayed in Visual Studio in an SSRS report.

The images displayed in the report.

What's the Problem?

Displaying images from an external website is all well and good, providing the owner of the website doesn't change anything! A safer option is to control the location of the image files you want to display by uploading them to the report server. The next part of this blog series shows you how.