How to Insert Images in your Google Spreadsheet Cells

While it has always been possible to add images to any sheet inside of your Google Spreadsheets, you can also insert images and icons inside individual spreadsheet cells as well.

To add an image to a cell, highlight the cell and click F2 to enter the formula mode and then type =image(“URL”) where URL is the public web address of that image. For instance, the following formula will insert a free image from Unsplash in your Google Spreadsheet.

=IMAGE("https://img.labnol.org/di/high-quality-photo.jpg")

Google Spreadsheets, by default, will scale the image to fit inside the area of the selected cell but you can easily change the default settings by adding another parameter to the image function.

For instance, a formula like =image(“URL”, 2) will stretch the image to fit inside the selected cell while =image(“URL”, 3) will insert the image into the cell at its original size.

You can also specify the existing height and width of the image in pixels by setting the mode to 4. The technique should be very handy for embedding social sharing icons in your spreadsheets.

=IMAGE("URL", 4, 300, 250)

If you are getting parsing errors, you are either using a non-existent image or you may have missing adding quotes around the image URL inside the image() formula.