Images in my vault seem broken and will not display

[frostyfriday]

Things I have tried

So I sync my vaults using Syncthing.
The vault on my android displays images fine.
The vault on my PC used to display all the images properly but it has suddenly stopped.
I have checked the vault and the images are in the vault.
If I try to add an image from within Obsidian on my PC, it finds the image and creates the sytax ![[RulerClamp.jpg]] but will not display the image.
When I look for the image in Obsidian’s file explorer, I find the image right where I expect it to be but if I click it, I get a little icon that looks like a broken link.

Any ideas?
Everything was definitely working a few days ago. I am not an utter Obsidian noob!

Have I accidentally changed a setting? I can’t think what.

[kenjibailly]

In your settings under tab “Files & Links”, can you check if your “Attachment folder path” is set to the right asset folder on your PC?

[frostyfriday]

Yes, I have it correct.

[kenjibailly]

Can you do the following steps for me so I can get more information, please?

1. Make sure you’re in “Reading View”
2. Open up the inspect tool (ctrl+shift+i)
3. Click on any element you see in the inspect tool, this way we put our focus in this screen
4. Click the button in the op left corner in the inspect tool called or press ctrl+shift+C and you’ll see that icon lighting up in blue
   
5. Now click on the link that isn’t working in your note (obsidian window) , this would be “RulerClamp.jpg” in your case.
6. Now you should see in your Inspect tool an element highlighted, please make a screenshot of it like this:
   
   

This way I could perhaps see more details of what’s going on, where the link is going to.

[frostyfriday]

Hi Ken, first thanks for your help.

Let me tell you a few other bits. I have my vault on an Android, where it works fine, but I like to be able to see it at work. The machine at work is windows 10. I have the ability to sign into many different machines at work (I work in labs at a university) so IT have our machines setup so that our documents folder is synced between all the machines we may sign into and use.

To test for you, I setup a new, simple vault that is mostly one file and an assets directory.
Even in this vault. If I just click the image, it too does not show up.
I then have one file, with a link to the image in it and that too, as expected does not show.

I followed your instructions and this is the information I got for the image:

<img src="app://local/%5C%5Cviu.int.viu.ca%5Credirects%5Cf%5Cfrostd%5CMy%20Documents%5CAnObsidianTestVault_dfgn10%5Cassets%5CCube.jpg?1647997608484">

If I get rid of the %5c etc then I get:

<img src="app://local/\\viu.int.viu.ca\redirects\f\frostd\My Documents\AnObsidianTestVault_dfgn10\assets\Cube.jpg?1647997608484">

I am not that familiar with this notation “app://local/”, but the “\viu.int.viu.ca\redirects\f\frostd\My Documents\AnObsidianTestVault_dfgn10\assets\Cube.jpg” looks correct
to me.

If I go to the vault in windows file explorer and copy the path I see it is:
“\viu.int.viu.ca\redirects\f\frostd\My Documents\AnObsidianTestVault_dfgn10\assets\Cube.jpg”

I can click the image there and it shows.

Any ideas?

-Dennis

[frostyfriday]

I just tried making a vault deep down in the root of my windows machine. When I do that, and drag an image into the vault, if I click it from Obsidian’s file explorer, I see the image.

If I take the exact same vault and put it into my “Documents” folder, then when I click the image, it is not visible in obsidian. My “Documents” folder is a windows redirected folder.

Is this an obsidian issue or is it something weird going on with our university’s network.

Oh, one more thing, I can see the images if I go click them from the windows file explorer.

Any insights or ideas would be well received. I am loving Obsidian, but at this point I am about ready to switching back to just having “standard” markdown files in a directory structure and using Typora on windows and Mac and Epsilon notes on Android.
I just love the way Obsidian does links ![[image.jpg|100]] or [[myfile]] just makes so much sense to me and is so much easier to work with.

[Dor]

@frostyfriday

windows redirected folder.

Could this be an Obsidian needing local files problem?

Obsidian needs all the files in an open vault to be available all of the time. Presumably a latency issue can interrupt this. At times thus requirement seems to conflict with other assumptions in the system.

[kenjibailly]

Thank you for giving me this information.

I have compared yours to mine and what seems to me is that your url is going to a shared network folder if I’m correct?

Mine looks like this:

app://local/K:\Nextcloud\Obsidian\Obsidian Vault\Archive\Assets\Ezra Prelaudia.png?1647555017103

What you can see in my example is that it points to my drive being “K:”
Yours points to \\viu.int.viu.ca which I’m guessing is a network folder?

I’m not sure if this is the problem, but it looks to me that Obsidian cannot read the image on this network drive.

[frostyfriday]

Hmm, thanks Ken.
I am a Mac person. Windows drives me nuts. Alas I have to use it for work. It is my understanding that the way these machines work is that yes, my “Documents” is somehow synced on the network, but it is available offline when I am not connected to my work network, either at work or via VPN.
I am 100% sure it was working before but unfortunately did not notice exactly when it stopped working because it is only images that seem to be an issue. Text based files are fine so it took a while before I clicked an image or went into preview mode and noticed the images were not there!
I will try to involve our IT guys but that will most likely just result in “Don’t use Syncthing” and “Don’t use Obsidian” which is why I am trying to figure it out myself.
Unfortunately I don’t understand the windows redirecting system enough to know if that is the problem or something in my Vault setup is the problem.
I am wondering if it is just a case of me having to point the vault to the actual local files.
I am going to dig around and try to understand this system that our IT are using a bit more.

[kenjibailly]

To see if that’s the problem, you could try to manually specify your image path in an img html tag. If that works, then this is not the problem.

Typical IT guys… I get ya.

I’ve used Syncthing, not sure how that would raise this problem though, unless something fishy is going on.

I’d try to get to see if it’s the path which is giving problems or something else. Cause for example there’s a number behind the .jpg, I personally don’t have a clue what that is for

[frostyfriday]

I think there is an issue with Obsidian.

If I put this in a file I created outside of my redirected windows files:

<img src="C:\adentemp\pic01.jpg" width="500" height="600">

Then it shows the image.

if I use:

<img src="\\viu.int.viu.ca\redirects\f\frostd\My Documents\DenTestObsidianVault\pic01.jpg" width="500" height="600">

Then it does not work, yet that is the path to the file on my system. It works in all my other apps.

This is driving me crazy. It was working a few weeks back!

[kenjibailly]

I’m not sure if it doesn’t recognize the drive or not.
Let’s say this isn’t the problem, perhaps there’s a permission issue for third party apps to read files in that folder?

I’m just trying to think with you here.

We could def use an Obsidian Insider / Staff member on this issue

[frostyfriday]

You may be right Ken, I don’t know. Hopefully our IT guys will have an answer next week, one that doesn’t shut me out of Obsidian.

[kenjibailly]

Keep us posted!
It’s Kenji btw, no worries

[frostyfriday]

Ah, sorry Kenji!

Will post if I find a solution.

[frostyfriday]

Solution: I just upgraded to the latest version and the image problem fixed itself.
I don’t know how I missed the upgrade but I did.
All images are behaving as the should now and I have installed Dataview, the Minimal theme and Quick Add and now I am really liking Obsidian. This gives me a good amount of control over my docs while still keeping them simple which is why I use markdown in the first place.

Thanks to the @WhiteNoise in this post for pointing out the obvious (install the latest version): Do your images display on a windows redirected system?