Why Some Photos Fail to Load: What I Learned After My Images Disappeared

Last updated on November 22nd, 2025 at 08:40 am

I was browsing my portfolio site and all the pictures appeared to disappear. There one second, there the next, blank squares that have that irritating broken image icon. I had taken hours in working out that layout and now it looked as though it was half complete.

Here’s what I found out.

The Usual Suspects: Paths and Typos.

As it happens most of the image failures are boiled down to something idiotic basic – incorrect file paths. I had renamed a folder, which contained images, to images (sinus words) and my server considered them totally different objects. That is case sensitive servers.

Something as small as a typo in your HTML such as typing photo.JPG, when you are supposed to type photo.jpg, hits the fan. The browser does not locate the file hence it gives up. My check revealed the existence of three misspelled names of the files. Sorted them and restarted the page and bingo pictures appear again.

Server Resilience: There is a Glass Ceiling.

At other times they are not you, it is them. The hosting server could also be offline or file permissions are configured in an incorrect manner. I found out that I had a permission of 600 on my image folder, which required 644. Technical-speaking, it is putting it across that no one can even see these files except me.

Then there is the CORS problem – your images exist in a different domain and are blocked by the server. I attempted to load external CDN image under no proper headers and Chrome did not cooperate. Security: specifying the server to accept cross-origin requests.

Your Internet Connection (Yes, Indeed)

I checked my site on the WiFi of coffee shops and half the images were failing to load. Slow connections do not hang around eternally, as one in case the image is taking too long to load, the browser proceeds. This is very common in mobile networks.

I could hardly load pictures of more than 2MB on 3G. The fix? Compress everything. When I decided to use TinyPNG, I reduced file sizes by 70 per cent and did not sacrifice quality. Even slow connections can cope with my pictures nowadays.

Browser Weirdness

Image data can spoil image data in your browser. I cleared my cache (Ctrl +Shift + Delete on Chrome) and miraculously some of the images that I thought were broken opened up. There were either old-fashioned or broken-down caches.

There are browsers that block mixed contents as well. In case your site is configured to use HTTPS, but you attempt to load images that are based on HTTP, the modern browsers go on a security frenzy and block them. It was solved by changing all my image URLs to HTTPS.

File Format Issues

This is one thing that I did not anticipate, not every format is supported on every browser. I also attempted AVIF (super compressed, enormous quality) pictures, but they would not be shown by older browsers. In the meantime I am falling back to picture element:

<picture>
  <source srcset="image.avif" type="image/avif">
  <source srcset="image.webp" type="image/webp">
  <img src="image.jpg" alt="description">
</picture>

In such a manner, new browsers receive the optimized file, and the older ones use JPEG.

What Actually Fixed My Site

I have run Google PageSpeed Insights and was able to call out all broken images. It turned out that I had the wrong paths, huge files and lost alt attributes. The report disaggregated the type and reasons of failed images.

Then I installed lazy loading, the images below the fold are not loaded at all, until you scroll closer to them. I have just added loading lazy to my image tags. Page speed improved by 40%.

The biggest win? Audiovisual auto-optimization on-the-fly transfer to CDN. Cloudinary was used to do format conversion, compression, and resizing. My images now load 3x faster.

Quick Takeaway

The reasons of why photos do not show up often usually narrow down to: incorrect file paths, server failures, slow connectivity, browsers or unsupported file formats. Make sure all your paths are correct first – which sets 80% of problems. On all other things, compress your images, employ CDNs and test on devices.

My portfolio is clean now again. No more broken image icons.

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