How to Send an Email with Embedded Image in Power Automate Easily 2026

Open Create in Power Automate and choose to build an instant cloud flow if you want to trigger it manually for testing, or pick a trigger that matches your real use case. The "Build an instant cloud flow" dialog lists a long set of trigger options beyond the obvious manual button — SharePoint events, HTTP requests, webhooks, and more — scrollable in a panel on the right. For this walkthrough the flow starts with "Manually trigger a flow," which is the simplest way to test the email-building logic before wiring it to a real trigger.

Add a "Get file content" action pointed at wherever the image lives — OneDrive or SharePoint are the common choices — and this pulls the raw file bytes into the flow as an output you can reference in later steps. This step alone doesn't do anything with the image yet; it just makes the binary data available to whatever comes next in the chain.

This is the step that actually makes inline embedding work. A Compose action takes the file content from the previous step and wraps it with the dataUriBody() expression, which converts the binary image data into a base64-encoded data URI string — the kind of value you'd normally see as a very long "data:image/png;base64,..." string.

That single string is everything an img tag needs to render the picture without linking out to any external file or attaching it separately. In the flow shown, this Compose step briefly flagged "Invalid parameters" until the correct file content reference was wired into its Inputs field, which is a common snag worth checking if your Compose step shows the same warning.

Add an "Initialize variable" action after Compose and set its value to the Compose output. This isn't strictly required — you could reference the Compose output directly in the email body — but it keeps the HTML template easier to read, since you're inserting a short variable name into your img src attribute instead of a Compose reference buried in expression syntax. It also makes the flow easier to debug, since you can inspect the variable's run history separately from the Compose step.

In your "Send an email (V2)" action, switch the body to HTML mode and write an img tag whose src attribute points to the variable you just initialized, something like <img src="@{variables('ImageDataUri')}" />. Because the data URI contains the full image data as text, the email client renders it inline directly from the HTML — no attachment, no external image request, and nothing that can break because a hosted file got moved or deleted later.

Run the flow and open the resulting email in a couple of different clients if you can — Outlook desktop, Outlook web, and Gmail don't always render embedded HTML identically. Data URIs are broadly supported but some older or more locked-down email clients strip them for security reasons, so if your audience includes a lot of unknown or older mail clients, it's worth testing there specifically rather than assuming it'll look the same everywhere it did in your own test.