Important: While the dynamic and interactive Google Charts are actively maintained, we officially deprecated the static Google Image Charts way back in 2012. It was turned off on March 18, 2019.
This page describes the basics of using the infographics server to make images.
Infographics Usage Policy
There's no limit to the number of requests per day you can make for infographics. However, we reserve the right to block any use that we regard as abusive.
Getting Started
The infographics server returns an image in response to a URL GET or POST request. All the data required to create the graphic is included in the URL, including the image type and size. For example, copy and paste the following URL in your browser:
https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=150x150&cht=qr&chl=Hello%20world
The image you see is a QR code representation of the phrase "Hello World". Try changing the phrase to your own name and refresh your browser. That's all it takes!
Here's a little more explanation of the URL:
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Optimizations
Here are a few optimizations for your images:
Improving load time on pages with many images
If you have just a few images on your page, the standard base URL https://chart.googleapis.com/chart
should
be fine. However, if you have many images, you can add a number 0-9 and a dot
just before chart.apis.google.com
. If you specify a different number
for each image on your page, the browser will try to load more images simultaneously,
rather than waiting to load them in sequence. However, you should only need this
if you're loading perhaps five or more images on a page. For example:
http://0.chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=...
http://1.chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=...
http://2.chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=...
- ...
Using POST
URLs are limited to 2K in length, so if your images has more data than that, you'll
have to use POST instead of GET. (GET is when you
type your image URL into your browser URL bar, or use it as the source of an <img>
element in a web page. POST requires additional programming in another language,
such as PHP or PERL).
You can also use POST when generating a page programmatically.