Why won't IE7 play nice with my local images?

October 30, 2008 9:44 AM

Internet Explorer 7 will not display some images when I create/view web sites on my PC. Any idea why?

This problem seems to be restricted to images I actually save locally. So what happens is:

1) My agency sends me all the files for a web site that they need me to work on, and everything displays fine in IE7 at first.

2) But after I edit one of the images, and re-save it, IE7 won't show it in the web page when I view it locally on my machine. It just shows the little "missing image" icon. If I right-click and select "Show Picture", nothing happens.

3) But if I open the image directly in the browser (going to the image itself, not via the HTML file), it opens.

4) And if I upload the site to my web server, it displays fine.

5) And all other browsers of all other creeds display it fine. (Even IE6.)

I've gone through all internet options, privacy and security options, and have selected the very lowest, bottom of the barrel security/privacy settings, have checked or unchecked any options that sounded like they would get in the way of anything at all. Popup blocker is disabled.

It happens with both gif and jpg.

I've googled to no avail. (Yes, I've tried deleting all temporary files, as all the googles say.)

This has gone on forever; it's only now that I'm mad as hell and refuse to take it without a fight anymore. Uploading my sites to a remote server just to test/view them on IE7 is getting really damn old.

There obviously has to be some obscure setting that I'm missing. Or maybe it's just so obvious that I'm missing it. Can you help me? Thanks.

posted by iguanapolitico to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Your webpages are likely written with absolute paths to the image files.

View the source code of the page that the image appears on. Search for the file name of one of the images, then let us know what the code is in that general area.
posted by odinsdream at 9:54 AM on October 30, 2008

May be a long shot...but in the site support I've done I've notice two things that often prevent images from working in Internet Explorer:

-Spaces in the file names (such as "my image.jpg versus myImage.jpg)
-Image was saved as CMYK versus RGB, or the DPI settings were too high

Chances are you've already checked for these things, but just thought I'd throw it out there.
posted by geekchic at 11:43 AM on October 30, 2008

The source is like:

<img src="images/imagename.jpg" height="50" width="100" alt="pretty picture">

I hand code, so nothing weird is getting in there. And no spaces in image names or special characters. All paths are relative.

I was starting to think that this may be something about how the file types are set up on my PC and how IE7 is interpreting them. Under "file types", though, all it says about GIF, JPG and PNG is that they're set up to open with Window Picture and FAX Viewer. Or that it could be something about how Photoshop saves them. (That's the only commonality with the images that IE7 won't open: they were all edited and saved on my PC using Photoshop.)

I re-stress: this works on other browsers on my PC locally, and it works on all browsers on my Mac, and it works on ALL browsers (including IE7) when I FTP the site to a remote server.

I hate the unanswerables. :)
posted by iguanapolitico at 4:12 PM on October 30, 2008

Oh, and I just double checked to make sure the jpgs are RGB (not CMYK), and they are. Thanks, though -- I hadn't thought of that.

(They're all 72dpi.)
posted by iguanapolitico at 4:17 PM on October 30, 2008

I had a similiar problem once and it turned out that the images that I was using were the same size as typical online ads and were therefore blocked by my Norton software with ad blocking (forgot the exact size). Once I tweaked the size of the images, they appeared normally. (Got rid of the Norton.)
posted by billspd at 1:17 PM on November 1, 2008