Copying a course copies links to images instead of actual images

[GrahamSmallwood]

I made my classes as Dev classes first.  Looked great with all kinds of screen shots.  When I copied it into my live course, everything looked fine to me.  But no student could see any images because they were linking back to my dev course and the students did not have access to dev.

Other teachers have not seen this problem because they make a new class as a copy of an old class instead of a copy of a dev class.  They still get links instead of images, but since the other class is public the students can still see the images.

Is this a bug, or did I miss a setting on the import?

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hi there, @GrahamSmallwood ...

My question for you would be...how were the images in the course originally inserted into the content pages?  Were they copy and pasted from another course?  Are the images in your course "Files"?  If you go to your course "Files" screen, check to see if the images for that course are listed somewhere on that page.  If the images are not there, then that almost always suggests to me the images are located in some other course.

Here's another thing you can do...

Take a look at the course URL in the address bar of your browser ... especially the Course ID number in the URL.  For example: https://SchoolName.instruture.com/courses/123456 where 123456 is your own Course ID number.  Then, go to a page in your course that has images on it that you can view.  Edit the page, and then click on the </> icon near the bottom right corner of the RCE (Rich Content Editor).

If you can find the HTML code for the image with the Course ID number, you can then compare it to the Course ID in your browser's address bar to see if it is the same.  For example, the code might look like this:

<img src="https://SchoolName.instructure.com/courses/######/files/223.../download?wrap=1" alt="watering can" width="145" height="130" data-api-endpoint="https://SchoolName.instructure.com/api/v1/courses/#####/files/223..." data-api-returntype="File" />

If the number for the image in the code does not match the Course ID from your browser's address bar, then you would need to use the RCE tools to insert the image into the page ... so that when the course is imported/copied to other course shells, the images will work correctly.

I hope this might be of some help to you.  Please let us know here in the Community if you have any questions along the way.  Good luck!

[GrahamSmallwood]

According to the docs, it is supposed to copy links over so that's the cause of the bug, but not the bug.  It makes sense from a server drive space point of view, but it defeats the point of Dev templates because the student-available-course-B now has a link to teacher-only-dev-class-A without read access.

The only solution that would make it usable but also optimized would be for a checkbox on the import process for "CopyFiles" so the target doesn't get inaccessible links.

For posterity: The actual solution slash workaround is you can go to the Files section of the Dev class and use CopyTo on the files to send them to the real class.  

[chriscas]

Hi @GrahamSmallwood,

I think what @Chris_Hofer was trying to ask is very important here...  Basically, images inserted through official methods (like the menus in the Canvas rich content editor) will get properly copied to the new course with students and the links would be adjusted to point to the new course as well.  If that's not happening for you, the most common reason is that the images were inserted through other methods, which the Canvas code doesn't detect on import and therefore doesn't adjust.

What you're describing is definitely frustrating, but I can assure you that it's not the behavior most Canvas users experience.  If you can describe how the content is being created with very precise descriptions, we may be able to help you adjust the process.

Hope to hear back from you soon!

-Chris