Post Archive

› May 28, 2004

Disappearing Images

  • Reported by Nate
Here's a really weird scenario to watch out for. Not really a new problem, but certainly new to me when I ran into it recently. Let's say you've setup an image gallery system for a client, perhaps that client posts images received from a variety of sources. In a seemingly random fashion, the gallery seems to break down for windows users. The problem rears itself by showing the oft feared white box with little red x, an icon which is supposed to indicate that the intended image was not loaded. The problem worsens as soon as the first page with such an image is loaded, more images start showing the same problem - even on entirely other websites! Closing all IE windows clears the problem, at least until another one of these nefarious missing images is browsed again. At this point, you might think yourself to be going a little loony. But don't start doubting your sanity, don't start trying to figure out what's wrong with your gallery system, do read Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 817177 which shows a bizzare bug with IE 6 sp1 and some images. >This problem may occur if you view a Web page that references an image that was saved from Adobe Photoshop 7.0 on Macintosh OS 10. Simply re-save the image in a newer or other version of Photoshop to clear the problem.

Comments

1. May 28, 2004 06:14 PM

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CCN Posted…

NEVER use the "Save as" command in any version of Photoshop for images that will be posted on a web server. Photoshop loads all kinds of metadata junk into the files, bloating them conisiderably and causing all sorts of problems. Always use "File: Save for Web..." I'm almost certain that this fixes the problem above.

2. May 30, 2004 11:39 AM

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holly Posted…

This may be a problem related to PhotoShop JPGs as your previous poster wrote. This has been around for a while. A problem for gallery users when they bypass saving the meta loaded image for display, EXIF info will also be discarded. For those just placing images on web documents, that is not a bad idea though, because the metadata, including EXIF info can add significantly to a image file size.

This is related to xml data inside jpg images that causes IE browsers to mess up.

More info at: Dave's Den, who says this started with PS version 7, http://www.dwynne.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/html/adobe_photoshop.html

Also see an informative piece at the RetouchPro website: http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4855 .

I was reading about this a few weeks ago, and was surprised I had not heard of this earlier. Notice the date on the RetouchPro piece is August 2001. The 2nd entry, especially informative. There appears to be a patch available for PS 7 users?

3. May 30, 2004 11:45 AM

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holly Posted…

I wrote: Notice the date on the RetouchPro piece is August 2001

That should read January 2003 for the date.

4. May 30, 2004 11:52 AM

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holly Posted…

At Photo.Net: solutions (including at the server), and resources for those needing help with this issue.

See: *Browser Problems Caused by Photoshop 7 JPEG images* (September 05, 2002) at: http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003j8d