How to Insert Image in Looker Studio

Adding a simple image to your report can be the difference between a dense wall of data and a clean, branded dashboard that people actually want to use. You can elevate your reports by adding a company logo, product photos, or performance icons. This tutorial will walk you through three different ways to insert images in Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio), from basic uploads to creating dynamic images that update automatically with your data.

Why Add Images to Your Looker Studio Reports?

Before jumping into the "how," let's quickly touch on the "why." You're busy, so why spend extra time adding visuals? The benefits are surprisingly practical:

• Improve Branding: Placing your company logo in the header or footer of every report is a simple way to create a consistent, professional, and official feel. If you're building reports for clients, adding their logo is a small touch that makes a big impact.
• Add Visual Context: Imagine a sales report for an e-commerce store. Instead of just a list of product names and "SKU-12345," you can display a small photo of each item next to its sales figures. This instantly makes the data more relatable and easier to scan.
• Increase Engagement and Readability: Let's be honest, staring at tables of numbers all day can be draining. Visuals break up the monotony. Simple icons, like green up-arrows for positive growth or red down-arrows for a decline, turn a confusing table into an instant, at-a-glance summary.
• Communicate Universally: A language barrier can make text-heavy reports difficult to interpret. Icons and images often translate more easily across different teams and regions, making your reports more accessible to a wider audience.

Method 1: Add a Static Image Using the Toolbar (The Easiest Way)

This is the most common and straightforward method, perfect for adding a logo, banners, or any other standalone image that doesn't need to change based on your data. Here’s how you do it.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Enter "Edit" Mode: First, open your Looker Studio report. To make any changes, you need to be in Edit mode. If you see chart-editing menus, you're already there. If not, click the Edit button in the top right corner.
2. Find the "Image" Tool: Look at the top toolbar, where you find options like 'Add a chart' and 'Add a control'. Towards the right, you'll see an icon that looks like a small mountain landscape in a box. Hover over it, and it will say "Image."
3. Place the Image on Your Report: After clicking the Image icon, a file selection dialog box will pop up. You have two options here:
4. Position and Resize: Once your image is on the canvas, you can click and drag it anywhere you like. To resize it, click on the image and drag the blue dots on the corners or sides. Hold the Shift key while dragging a corner to maintain the original aspect ratio and prevent the image from looking stretched or squished.
5. Customize the Style (Optional): With the image selected, a property panel will appear on the right side of the screen. Under the Style tab, you can customize things like:

This method is all you need for 90% of use cases where you need an image to lock in place, like a report header or a simple icon.

Method 2: Display Dynamic Images Inside a Table

Static images are great, but what if you want images that change based on the data in your report? This technique is a game-changer for e-commerce dashboards, content performance reports, or social media tracking. You're not just adding an image, you're using images as a dimension.

The trick is to use a data source (like a Google Sheet) that contains URLs pointing to your images. Looker Studio can then be told to interpret these URLs as images instead of just text.

Step 1: Prepare Your Data Source

For this to work, you need two things: a data source and direct image URLs within that source. A Google Sheet is a common choice.

Let’s say you’re tracking sales for different shirt designs. Your Google Sheet could look like this:

• Column A (Text): Product Name (e.g., "Classic Blue Tee")
• Column B (URL): ProductImageURL (e.g., http://yourstore.com/images/blue-tee.jpg)
• Column C (Number): UnitsSold (e.g., "254")

The URLs in Column B must be publicly accessible and link directly to an image file. Once your data is structured correctly, connect this Google Sheet to your Looker Studio report as a new data source.

Step 2: Change the Field Type to "Image"

When you connect your sheet, Looker Studio will likely recognize the ProductImageURL column as a standard Text or URL field. You need to tell it to treat those links as visual images.

1. In your Looker Studio report, navigate to the menu and select Resource > Manage added data sources.
2. Find the Google Sheet you just added and click Edit.
3. You'll see a list of all the fields (columns) from your sheet. Find your ProductImageURL field.
4. To the right of the field name, you’ll see its current data type. Click on it.
5. In the dropdown menu, go to Type > URL > Image. This tells Looker Studio, "Hey, when you see a link in this column, don't just show the text - show the actual image."
6. Click Done in the bottom right corner.

Step 3: Add the Images to Your Table

Now for the fun part. Drag and drop any table or chart onto your report and follow these steps.

1. Add a new Table to your report from the "Add a chart" dropdown.
2. With the table selected, look at the Setup panel on the right.
3. Under Dimension, add your ProductImageURL field (it should now have a tiny image icon next to it). Also, add your Product Name dimension.
4. Under Metric, add your UnitsSold metric.

Instantly, your plain table will transform. Instead of a URL string, each row will now display the actual product image. You can resize the ProductImageURL column in the table by dragging its border, just like in a spreadsheet, to make the photos larger or smaller.

This dynamic method allows you to create highly intuitive reports that are filtered just like any other chart. If a user filters for "Tee", the table will update to show only the images and data for your t-shirt products. Pretty cool, right?

Method 3: Conditional Images with the CASE Formula

Ready to level up? You can dynamically display different icons based on your data’s values. For instance, you can show a green checkmark if a project is 'Complete', a yellow hourglass if it's 'In Progress', and a red ‘X’ if it's 'Blocked'.

This requires creating a calculated field using a CASE statement. To do this, you first need to have the URLs for the icons you want to use hosted somewhere findable and a spreadsheet with a list of statuses for different initiatives.

Let's use a project management dashboard as an example.

1. First find or create URLs for your icons. You can upload them to a WordPress media library or any other host. Say you have these URLs:
2. Next, in Looker's Manage added data sources panel, edit your data source and click Add a Field.
3. Name your new field something like "Status_Icon".
4. In the formula box, enter a CASE statement. It’s like a series of "if/then" rules. It checks the value of a field (in our case, Project_Status) and returns a different image URL for each condition.

The formula would look like this:

CASE WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Project_Status, ".Complete.") THEN "http://.../complete.png" WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Project_Status, ".In Progress.") THEN "http://.../in-progress.png" WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Project_Status, ".Blocked.") THEN "http://.../blocked.png" ELSE NULL END

Save this calculated field. Just like you did in the previous method, make sure to change this new field's type from Text to Type > URL > Image.

Now, you can add the "Status Icon" field to your tables. It will automatically show the correct icon next to each project, giving your team an immediate visual cue about the health of each initiative without having to read a thing.

Final Thoughts

From adding a simple logo to displaying fully dynamic, data-driven images in your tables, mastering images in Looker Studio is a powerful way to make your reports more professional, intuitive, and valuable. These visual elements help tell a story that raw numbers alone can’t always capture, transforming your dashboards from mere reporting tools into a communication platform.

At the end of the day, the goal of any dashboard is quick and easy understanding of performance. As we improve our visualization and design process, new tools can make the entire analytics process simpler and faster. Here at Graphed (target="_blank" rel="noopener"), for example, we let you create that entire dashboard – charts, data connections, and all – just by typing out what you want. Instead of following steps to manually build a table of product images and sales, you can just ask, "Show me a table of my bestselling products by revenue with images," and get an interactive dashboard instantly, so you can get straight into analyzing your results.