Why am I getting missing or distorted images in NP pages?

Two images you may see instead of your previews or originals are these:

   

These images appear where an original or preview would otherwise be seen and indicate the image can't be located by NP. Likely reasons for an uploaded site:

• The coding calls for previews and/or originals but they weren't ticked for upload at the publish phase.
• The files on the web server have been moved or renamed since site upload.
• A folder in the path to the file's location has been renamed since site upload.

For NPS sites:

• The OS account under which NP is running cannot resolve ('see') the locations in the path passed to it by Portfolio Server. Note that Portfolio Server doesn't send the file to NP but rather it tells NP where it lives and NP fetches it to pass to the web browser.
• The original files have been moved or renamed and the associated records haven't been updated.
• A folder in the path to the file's location has been renamed and the associated records haven't been updated.

If you were to see this:

... then you have a different problem. What this tells you is that you're trying to display an image not suitable for web browsing. For instance, you may have asked Portfolio to show an original which is a PSD. NP can make a dynamic preview (JPG) of a TIFF original but it can't show - or rather the browser can't show - the TIFF itself.

The above images are only returned by NP is you are using one of the following NP codes (used by default in most/all built-in template sets): RecordSet.record.preview, RecordSet.record.original.

One problem is the above don't output HTML code to W3C standards. If you want validating web pages you'll need to insert the output code into the template yourself. That solves the validating issue but you won't get the 'missing' images above. Instead you'll see either the record's thumbnail, a resized version of the thumbnail or a browser 'broken/missing image' icon.

Regardless of exactly what you see on screen, 'missing' images seem to crop up most often when first publishing a new NP Server site. This is normally because the NP application can access Portfolio Server data (it does this via TCP/IP) but does not have permissions to see either/both the previews folder or/and the folders holding the originals. Alternatively, NP may have permission to access those folders but the path used is not consistent with that in the catalogue records' Path field data owing to inconsistent set-up of network shares.

In the unlikely and uncommon event that your web page's code somehow points to a non-existent record, e.g. by pointing to an unused or deleted ItemID number you'll likely get some for of NP error message instead of the above images. This could occur if the user leaves a web detail page open (pointing to a particular ItemID) and meanwhile someone using a client deletes that item; should the user refresh their webpage, the ItemID would no longer exist and NP will pass back an error message.

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Question: Why am I getting missing or distorted images in NP pages? [FAQ00385.htm]
Last Update:- 04 October 2006

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