developers.home-assistant/docs/core/entity/image.md

title	sidebar_label
Image entity	Image

An image entity can display a static image. Derive a platform entity from homeassistant.components.image.ImageEntity.

The image entity is a simplified version of the camera entity, and supports serving a static image or an image URL that can be fetched.

An implementation can provide either a URL from where an image will automatically be fetched or image data as bytes. When providing a URL, the fetched image will be cached in self._cached_image, set self._cached_image to None to invalidate the cache.

Properties

:::tip Properties should always only return information from memory and not do I/O (like network requests). Implement update() or async_update() to fetch data. :::

Name	Type	Default	Description
content_type	str	image/jpeg	The content-type of the image, set automatically if the image entity provides a URL.
image_last_updated	datetime.datetime | None	None	Timestamp of when the image was last updated. Used to determine state. Frontend will call image or async_image after this changes.
image_url	str | None	UNDEFINED	Optional URL from where the image should be fetched.

Methods

Image

Implement async_image or image if your entity returns bytes of the image instead of providing a URL. Frontend will call async_image or image to fetch the image. If the image is fetched remotely, image data should be cached and the cache invalidated when image_last_updated is changed.

Note that:

• The image entity's async_image or image method is only called when frontend fetches the image.
• Frontend will:
  • Fetch the image once when a page with an image entity is loaded
  • Refetch the image when the image entity's state changed by the image entity changing image_last_updated

This means it's incorrect to bump the image_last_updated property inside async def async_image. Instead, the image entity should, when an updated image is available or periodically if the image should be refetched after some time, update the image_last_updated timestamp. This can for example happen as part of an entity coordinator update.

class MyImage(ImageEntity):
    # Implement one of these methods.

    def image(self) -> bytes | None:
        """Return bytes of image."""

    async def async_image(self) -> bytes | None:
        """Return bytes of image."""