Manipulating images in Python within Excel

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Calling Python code from within Excel, and the vast functionality it unlocks Part three of a five-part series of blogs
Excel and Python are getting ever more intertwined: you can now use the PY function to write (and call) Python code from within an Excel worksheet Writing Python code within an Excel workbook to fill cells Returning dataframes from Python code to fill Excel ranges Manipulating images in Python within Excel (this blog) How does Python reference modules within Excel? Creating and calling your own functions in Python

Calling Python code from within Excel, and the vast functionality it unlocks

Part three of a five-part series of blogs

Excel and Python are getting ever more intertwined: you can now use the PY function to write (and call) Python code from within an Excel worksheet

Writing Python code within an Excel workbook to fill cells
Returning dataframes from Python code to fill Excel ranges
Manipulating images in Python within Excel (this blog)
How does Python reference modules within Excel?
Creating and calling your own functions in Python

Posted by Andy Brown on 27 October 2025

In this blog

Adding images in Excel
Referencing the image
What type of object is the image returned?
Basic processing

This part of the blog shows how you can apply effects to images using the Python Pillow module:

Adding images in Excel

To get this to work each image must be included in a single cell. Here's how to add an image like this:

Here we're inserting an image into a single cell from the available online pictures.

You can then adjust the row height and column width to change the size of this image:

The image was square, so we've made our row height and column width the same.

Referencing the image

You can show an image just by getting a reference to it:

This will show a copy of the picture in another cell.

This uses the PIL image library module. Again, experienced Python programmers will be wondering where this is referenced - read the part of this blog on modules for the answer to this question.

What type of object is the image returned?

If you're curious (and I hope you are) you could have a look to see what sort of thing this image is:

Get the type of the picture, and convert this to a string for display. It turns out this is a JpegImageFile in the PIL module!

Basic processing

Here's one simple example of how you could use Python to render images in black and white, not colour:

Here we're doing a simple conversion to greyscale, but the possibilities are almost endless!

The great thing about this is that you can now copy the Python code to another cell, to process another animail:

The same code is now leaching the colour out of a deer too.

Notice the way that I changed the names of the variables in my Python code to make them generic, so that the code would still make sense when I copied it to reference a different animal's picture.

Parts of this blog
Writing Python code within an Excel workbook to fill cells Returning dataframes from Python code to fill Excel ranges Manipulating images in Python within Excel (this blog) How does Python reference modules within Excel? Creating and calling your own functions in Python