Can I use an external image URL for the nav bar logo and login page logo?

[Lachlan-Wintour]

Hello. I am wondering if it is possible to use an image URL for the navbar and login page logo. When I upload the images in the theme editor, they don't appear in Canvas. I am using a self hosted instance.

[greydon · Accepted solution]

Hello @Lachlan-Wintour 

Thank you for contacting the Canvas Community. We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with using an external URL for nav bar and course images. It is a possibility, but isn't a normal feature and requires using API or HTML to achieve this.  However,  uploading images to these areas should be working and if they are not, you may want to contact canvas support or  try basic trouble shooting like different browser, device, or network.

You'll want to make these edits using the theme editor and overriding defaults with HTML/CSS. Here is the Canvas guide:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/tr-learncanvas/docs/CanvasThemeEditorComponents.pdf

You can also try changing an icon for an external tool (and possibly the nav bar) First, the image needs to be hosted somewhere publicly accessible to Canvas. The option which was recommended to this account is to upload the icon file to the course files of a public course in the instance. The URL for that file will then be used for the value of icon_url.Once you have that image publicly hosted somewhere, you can edit the value of icon_url for the global navigation with the API call (https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/external_tools.html#method.external_tools.update).

If the API call doesn't work, you'd need to explore customizing using HTML/CSS. Hopefully this helps!