Thanks for the additional thought Ido.
That was one of the first workarounds we considered after noticing that the blob field just wasn't present in the cross-tab expert. And we heavily use "Underlay Following Sections" for other purposes in our reports.
However, we have variable heights within our cross-tabs based on 4 levels of Row grouping. We would want the image to be associated with the first level of Row grouping, but each first level could have 1 or more elements in the next level grouping, and the same holds for at least another level of Row grouping after that. Even if there was some way to dynamically position each image based on calculated coordinates, I don't know how we could calculate the correct position from the data being fed into the cross-tab.
I believe I've seen some forum posts about people hooking custom .NET code into events raised by either the report instantiation and/or the report generation, and then programmatically interacting with the report. So, maybe there is some path down that route, but I haven't been able to locate relevant documentation. And, even if I could find that documentation, I expect it would be a complex task with our time potentially better spent on the effort to reimplement the reports in SQL Server Reporting Services that supports images in cross-tabs.
If I hear there is a feature request in the pipeline to include images in the Row (and Column) groupings of Cross-Tabs, waiting some number of months for an update with that feature is also a viable option. So, Don Williams, can you submit a feature request or let me know a channel for doing so?
Pete