In a previous post, I showed an example of how to retrieve taxonomy images that are attached via Advanced Custom Fields.

However, what if you want to access it outside of the category.php, tag.php or taxonomy.php templates?

Field Info

In this example, your ACF field is named ‘associated_image’ and ‘chosen-image-size’ is the desired image size that is set within your theme. Note: the ACF field is also set to return an array.

Full Snippet Example:

// Retrieves post categories' object outside the loop.
$cat = get_the_category();

// Narrows down to get term ID.
$term_id = $cat[0]->term_id;

// Get all term data via term ID.
$term = get_term( $term_id );

$attachment_id = get_field( 'associated_image', $term );

// URL of image at specific size.
$media = $attachment_id['sizes'][ $size ];

return $media;

Additional Reading:

• ACF Docs: Taxonomy
• ACF Docs: How To Get Values from Another Post