Images

An image on a worksheet is not a cell value. It sits on a drawing overlay that floats above the grid, so nothing about the cell underneath it changes and reading that cell returns whatever it held before. A sheet has room for exactly one drawing, which means every image and every chart on the sheet shares it. Build one drawing, add everything to it, then hand it to the sheet with SetDrawing.

What decides where the image lands is the anchor you ask for when you call Drawing.AddImage. AnchorTypeAbsolute pins it to a fixed offset from the top-left of the sheet, AnchorTypeOneCell pins the top-left corner to a cell and keeps a fixed size, and AnchorTypeTwoCell pins both corners so the image moves and resizes with the rows and columns it spans. All three satisfy the same Anchor interface, and the methods that don’t apply to a given anchor type are silent no-ops rather than errors. That is the single thing most likely to waste your afternoon, so the insert guide leads with it.

Extraction is the reverse trip, and worth knowing about if you are handed workbooks produced elsewhere. Sheet.Images() walks the sheet’s drawing relationships and returns the images in the order they are related, as the bytes that were stored, in whatever format the original author used.

Where to look