For a long time I’ve loved the Yahoo weather App which has a great quality picture of the area selected and is used as the background image for the weather app. For example when you look up Sydney it shows an image of Sydney in the background, Melbourne selected shows an image of Melbourne in the background.
I’ve tried and failed for a while to get an API key (Think I just couldn’t find the link where to get them). I really like using images in my Power BI Dashboards and would love to connect to the Flikr API and bring in the images. It has a Geolocation Call available.
First step for me would be simply how do we connect the API to Power Bi and Secondly how would we do a API call of an image by location. Hoping others can help, here is a link to the webpage for the Flikr API. https://www.flickr.com/services/api/
This is a really interesting question. How complex the answer is depends a lot on how much you want to automate this process. Once you have your API key, getting the photos by geocoded location seems pretty straightforward using this feature of the API:
Once you download the photos, you can take the ones you like and upload them to an image hosting site (I use Imgbb.com which works really well with Power BI, but there are many good ones). Once you’ve uploaded the images, select Embed Codes and then Direct Links:
This will return a list of URLs you can then read into Power BI, set as type Image URL, and then they can be viewed within Power BI tables, matrixes, slicers and using custom visuals such as Simple Image, just as graphics on a page.
It gets more complicated if you want to really automate this process. Chris Webb had a good article in his blog last year about how Power Automate could be used to fill out web forms like the Flickr one above:
I hope this is helpful. I’d be interested to hear how this process goes for you.
Glad you that was helpful to you. Please do let me know how it goes, as I’ve become really interested in manipulation of images in Power BI both through some of the stuff I’ve done in the Data Challenges and now work on re: the dynamic Enterprise DNA Learning Map.
Good news if you want to go the whole nine yards and automate this process – we are bringing on a Power Platform expert soon, and are planning to release courses on Power Apps and Power Automate later this spring.
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