Image data type in Looker Studio

Last Updated: December 17, 2024

Note: Google Data Studio is now known as Looker Studio.

Use the ‘Image’ data type if you want Looker Studio to expect the URLs of images when processing a field in the underlying data source.

Follow the steps below to use the image data type in Looker Studio:

Step-1: Navigate to your Looker Studio account and then click on the ‘Create’ button:

create button 2

Step-2: Click on the ‘Data Source’ option to create a new data source schema:

Create data source 2

Step-3: Find and click on the Google Sheets connector:

Google sheets 2

Step-4: Select your Google Sheets data source:

Google sheet name 1

The selected Google Sheets data source contains the following data:

new schema 2

This data source contains a field called ‘Product Images URL‘ which contains the URLs of product images. This type of field is called an image field.

Step-5: Click on the ‘Connect’ button at the top right-hand side:

connect 3

Your new data source schema is going to look like the one below:

Product sheet 3

Step-6: Set the data type of the ‘Product Images URL‘ field from ‘URL’ to ‘Image’:

product image url
change to image
change data tupe to image 1

The ‘Image’ data type is used for only those fields which return data of type image. The image fields are used to display images in the data table of a report.

Step-7: Click on the ‘Create Report’ button to create a new report from the data source schema:

create report 2

Step-8: Click on the ‘Add to report’ button:

Add to report

Looker Studio will automatically create a new table in your report:

product report 2

Step-9: Drag and drop the following fields one by one from the ‘Available Fields’ section to the ‘Dimensions’ section:

  • Product Images URL
  • Product Cost
new field

Step-10: Remove the ‘Record count’ metric by clicking on the cross button next to it:

remove record 1

Your data table is now going to look like the one below:

report image 2

Step-11: Re-size your data table so that you can see all the product images

Step-12: Click on the ‘View’ button (on the top right-hand side of your screen) to view your report in the view mode:

view report 3

In view mode, your data table is going to look like the one below:

View report 2

Note(1): The type of images that are generally added to a data table are product thumbnails or video thumbnails.

Note(2): The size of the image displayed in a table depends upon the width of the column containing the image. So the bigger the column width, the bigger the image will be.

Note(3): The image fields only work in tables. If you change the chart visualisation type, any image field in the chart will be ignored by Looker Studio or the image URL will appear as the dimension value.

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