Google Data Studio: Google Drive Images Now Showing
I created several visualizations for Google Data Studio, to easily display your data exactly as you want, through HTML templates.
Until now, for security reasons, it was not possible to display images inside this type of visualization, as documented by Google:
Indeed, if Google allows external developers to create new visualizations for everyone to use inside Data Studio, they don’t want to put your data at risk 😬 and thus block all data exchange between those visualizations and the external world 😭.
Images stored in Google Drive are now allowed 🎉
As a developer of a community visualization or as an end user of an existing visualization allowing images, you can now display images stored in Google Drive.
Best is to rely on the thumbnail URL of your Google Drive file:
1- Upload your image in Google Drive
2- Open it in a new tab and grab its ID — everything between /d/ and the next /
3- Add this ID at the end of the standard thumbnail URL:
https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?sz=w800&id=XXX
And voilà! You can now use that image inside any Data Studio Community Viz!
Want to see a live example?
Here’s a Data Studio report you can copy:
https://datastudio.google.com/s/vOSCFfactHM
The Data Source is a Google Sheet with Google Drive images in column J.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WzvNt8IolcYC81KGw4KVC2FeMpscGt4BReNxpnRdIh8/edit#gid=0
And all images are stored in this Google Drive folder:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1sp71x0SlgvBhzTPMJuc3QS-DNWpn5bRS?usp=sharing
What do to next?
👉 check all the custom vizs I created for Data Studio
👉 and everything else I’m working on: mail merge add-ons, toolbox for Google Drive,…
