Using SharePoint’s Imaging Web Service to access Publishing Images

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday trying to access the images in the Images list (also known as Publishing Images) of a SharePoint site using the SOAP-based Imaging web service. Every time it failed, usually with an uninformative error message.

Finally, I used cURL to send the SOAP requests so that I could see every last detail of the transaction. The SOAP response was pretty clear at that point:

The list PublishingImages is not found

or

The list Images is not found

I tried other Picture Libraries on the site, and that worked fine. That’s when it dawned on me: the SharePoint Images (or PublishingImages) list is a Document Library, not a Picture Library. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but fine, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve run into something nonsensical in SharePoint.

I was hoping to use the download method of the Imaging web service. I don’t have an alternative solution at this time, but I hope to find one soon using one of the other SharePoint web services.

5 thoughts on “Using SharePoint’s Imaging Web Service to access Publishing Images”

  1. My solution at the moment is to use the Lists web service to find out the URLs of the images, and then access the images directly.

  2. Can you please share your solution code. I’m trying to use the imaging web service as well but no luck, i want to diplay images from a SharePoint library into a .aspx which will be on a different server [GIS server].

  3. A couple questions:

    Are the images in the Images library? If so, you can’t use the Imaging web service, Imaging.asmx. You will need to use a different web service to access the list data and retrieve the image URL.

    Are the images in a Picture Library? If so, you can retrieve the images as 64-bit encoded strings via Imaging.asmx web service. You will need a method of converting the string into an image on your GIS server.

    Let me know which is applicable in your case, and I can try to provide more details.

  4. I have successfully added text/description to fields in a sharepoint2010 list. But so far no luck with adding an image to a specific field ( publishing image field) in a specific list through web service. Any thoughts?

  5. i know this is kind of late reply,
    but the publishing images URL is actually the Images list,
    so use Images instead of publishing images

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