Adding Images to Dashboards
Adding images to your Looker dashboards is an easy way to make them look personalised and bespoke to your organisation. You can include your logo, a graphic explaining your metrics or data, or anything else that might help make your dashboards more useful or give them some flair.
By adding a text tile you can reference an online image either using Markdown or plain HTML syntax. The Markdown syntax looks like this:
Although the equivalent HTML isn't much more complicated, and allows you to add a style attribute to tweak how the image is displayed:
<img alt="Another cute kitten pic" src="http://placekitten.com/g/600/480" style="border: 2px solid blue;" />
If the images you want aren't available online, and while there are many places to host images for free, you might not want to put your organisation's images on some random website.
If you happen to be using Google Workspace you can put your images in Google Drive and use them from there, though there's a bit of a trick to doing this.
First, the image needs to be shared, either publicly to anyone with the link, or within your organisation (great if you're already using Google accounts to authenticate with Looker!)
Second, you need to change the 'Share URL' you get from Google drive. The URL will look something like this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ol-i_XFC_VGhI373SEof5t3eHjJw9CNA/view?usp=sharing
The part between the /file/d/ and /view?usp=sharing is the file's ID in Google Drive - you need to change the URL to look like this:
https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1ol-i_XFC_VGhI373SEof5t3eHjJw9CNA
Copy this new URL somewhere and test it in your browser - if you've done it right, it will redirect and display the image alone i.e. not inside Google drive. You can now use the URL above which you copied as the image source URL in your dashboard tiles! This probably isn't really supported by Google and is subject to bandwidth quotas but it's an easy way for non-technical users to host images for use in dashboards.
Bonus: images added to Looker dashboards can also be GIFs, if you want to add some animation to your data!
