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Why don't pictures show when I visit websites?

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Summary: There are many reasons why pictures don't show on websites. Some you can control, but others are problems with the websites themselves.

Why don't pictures show when I visit websites?

Website pictures show as red X's? Or perhaps the images are garbled? Or maybe they look stretched and out of proportion?

There are a number of things that can affect how pictures show up in your browser. Some you control, but many problems are also caused by the websites themselves.

Let's look at a few things that can happen.

If you get a red x like this: image, that's the browser's indication that it tried to download a picture but was unable to. If instead you get this little icon: image that's what the browser uses to indicate that it's still downloading the picture, but hasn't gotten around to trying (because it's busy download other items on the page) or at least hasn't yet given up. Be patient, and you'll soon either see the image or the red x.

What if ALL you get is red X's for all pictures on all sites?

Most browsers allow you to turn off downloading pictures completely as a way to download only the text of a website faster. The first step would be to check to make sure that's configured properly. In Internet Explorer, that's in Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, and then in the Multimedia section of the list, there's an item Show Pictures.

If that's set properly to show pictures, then you might check to see if you have any ad-blocking or content filtering software installed. Sometimes they can erroneously start blocking everything that isn't text.

If you're seeing red X's on only some sites, then it's more typically either a problem downloading or a web site design issue.

A common place for examples of both is eBay.

I've seen eBay simply be too overloaded to reliably deliver it's pages, and typically what happens is that images will fail. This can happen on other sites as well, and the thing to do is simply try again later.

eBay also lets you host photos of your auction items elsewhere, and sometimes people just get it wrong. They enter the location or name of their picture incorrectly, and hence the picture simply can't work. This also happens frequently on discussion boards where people try to post links to pictures that end up being incorrect.

Another common mistake is for a website to reference a picture by a path local to the designer's machine, say "c:\pictures\image.jpg", rather than via a proper URL, such as "http://example.com/image.jpg". To the designer it works, because there is a "c:\pictures\image.jpg" that their browser picks up when displaying the page for them. To the rest of us, it's another red X.

If a picture is garbled even after having been downloaded more than once (by hitting refresh), then it's probably a problem with the picture itself. There's nothing you can do but perhaps notify the website owner.

If a picture looks out of proportion, perhaps appearing squashed horizontally or vertically, that too it typically a website problem. HTML, the language used to make web pages, allows the designer to say "the picture is this big: x by y". If the picture is NOT that big, then the browser makes it that big by shrinking or stretching it. If I have a 200 by 200 pixel picture, and I tell the browser to display it as 100 by 200, then it's going to squish it together to make it fit (and it'll probably look horrible).

Finally, in the Advanced Options we looked at earlier, there's a setting labeled "Enable Automatic Image Resizing". That's not related to HTML sizing we just talked about, but rather it allows Internet Explorer to resize pictures to fit your window if they're too big. Resizing a picture can cause distortion and other problems so that's an option I typically turn off.

Related:

Article 325 | Posted June 15, 2004

Recent Comments
0 Comments

Thanks buddy,
It really works.

Posted by: priju at July 18, 2008 7:53 AM

All of that didn't work, I guess it is important top note that this only happens in vista

Posted by: jacob at July 19, 2008 2:10 AM

this article helped me soo much! after i read it it, the problem seemed so simple but i just couldnt figure out how to get pictures to show up on my pages. i was in the right advanced area i just didnt know where to look

long story short....THANKS ALOT!!!

Posted by: Marcus M at July 29, 2008 10:20 AM

Thanks....all I needed to do was click "Show Pictures" and everything cleared up....boy IE7 can sure cause some trauma!!!

Phil Freeland

Posted by: Phil at August 2, 2008 11:54 AM

I only have trouble seeing the Yahoo pictures (I get red blocks like many of you) when my Verizon Internet Security Suite is on. When I disconnect that, everything is fine, but then I don't want to leave my computer unprotected. I don't know how to turn off whatever setting is stopping me from seeing the imsges. But it's really annoying.

Posted by: Victoria at August 19, 2008 11:10 AM

Of all the articles I've read about the red X's NONE of them address the problem if you are running att yahoo e-mail. They do NOT have the same commands that Outlook Express has. Does ANYONE have the problem with ATT Yahoo ???

Posted by: T Swift at August 25, 2008 5:49 PM

i have just built a basic website in office publisher all my photo's come up in firefox but some are missing in internet explorer and i just get the red cross how can i fix it? please

Posted by: alex boyd at August 26, 2008 12:57 PM

One of the computers on our server is having a problem viewing images and even buttons on websites visited. There is no red 'x' and no downloading icon, only blank white space - which they can roll over with their mouse and view the tag on the appropriate button...only if they know it is there....What could this problem be?

Posted by: ALTI at August 29, 2008 7:13 AM

Thanks for taking your time to do this website, this helps me sooo much with problems i run into.

Posted by: Lisa at August 30, 2008 4:38 AM

all i get in yahoo is red blocks instead of pictures. can you please help. Thanks Alan

Posted by: alan at September 20, 2008 9:46 AM

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