[ARCHIVED] Embedded images not showing up

[eschoch]

A few other teachers and I are having issues with our embedded images in our quizzes not showing up when the students go to take them. When I click to "Preview" the quiz myself, I can see them, but none of my students can. Help?

[awilliams · Accepted solution]

Hey  @eschoch ​, can you provide a little bit more information so we can give you the best answer.

1) Can you use student view to see if there is a "lock" icon where the image should be? (What is Student View?​)

- If you are seeing a "lock" icon where the picture should be you need to change the publish state of the file. Check out How do I restrict files and folders to students in Canvas? for more information about that.

2) If you aren't seeing a "lock" icon in place of the image when in student view, or correcting the publish state of the file doesn't correct the issue, can you describe the steps you're using to add these images?

Thanks!

[eschoch · Accepted solution]

Thanks for replying so quickly, awilliams​! The other teachers were having locks show up on their images, so I forwarded your response to them and it should work.

I looked in student view and the pictures are showing up, then logged in as one of my students and the pictures are showing up for her now as well. I also gave the quiz in the morning and none of the students said anything, so maybe it was a strange temporary glitch? Here's the icon that was showing up instead of the pictures:

I uploaded the pictures while making the quiz by going to "Images" on the content bar on the right side of the screen, then clicking the "Upload a new image" button and uploading the images (they were png's in case that might be part of the problem), then clicking on them to put them in the rich content editor.

[ericg · Accepted solution]

I have had the same problem but found a weird workaround (at least for my case).

1. Have the students open the quiz and then right-click on any broken image icon.  A context menu should pop up and in that menu they should select "open in a new tab" or "view" or "download", depending on the browser.
2. The students should then totally ignore that new tab or viewed image.  On one type of browser it asked to navigate away from the page.  This is OK.
3. Finally, the students should then just refresh the browser quiz page.  For those that had to navigate away, just enter the quiz again.  For my students, all the missing images then magically loaded on the quiz.

I hope that this helps someone diagnose the problem and maybe find a better cure!

[jerra_strong · Accepted solution]

Hi, if you copied the course, it's possible the images were not copied along, and the link for these images actually points to the old course (you have access to the old course, your students don't).  If you right-click the image in your browser and use "Inspect Element", or the equivalent in your browser, you might see something like this in the code (the img means image).

<img src="https://yourschool.instructure.com/courses/1234/photo.jpg" ..... >

Make sure the courses/1234 part matches what you see when you are on the course homepage of your course (in the address bar at the top of the screen).  If the numbers are different, the images are in the wrong course and need to be fixed!

[awilliams · Accepted solution]

Hey  @eschoch ​, can you provide a little bit more information so we can give you the best answer.

1) Can you use student view to see if there is a "lock" icon where the image should be? (What is Student View?​)

- If you are seeing a "lock" icon where the picture should be you need to change the publish state of the file. Check out How do I restrict files and folders to students in Canvas? for more information about that.

2) If you aren't seeing a "lock" icon in place of the image when in student view, or correcting the publish state of the file doesn't correct the issue, can you describe the steps you're using to add these images?

Thanks!

[eschoch · Accepted solution]

Thanks for replying so quickly, awilliams​! The other teachers were having locks show up on their images, so I forwarded your response to them and it should work.

I looked in student view and the pictures are showing up, then logged in as one of my students and the pictures are showing up for her now as well. I also gave the quiz in the morning and none of the students said anything, so maybe it was a strange temporary glitch? Here's the icon that was showing up instead of the pictures:

I uploaded the pictures while making the quiz by going to "Images" on the content bar on the right side of the screen, then clicking the "Upload a new image" button and uploading the images (they were png's in case that might be part of the problem), then clicking on them to put them in the rich content editor.

[awilliams]

Those steps you described should work for uploading a new image and embedding it into the item you're working on. I am glad to hear things seem to be working now. I am going to mark this question as "Assume Answered." Please let us know if you have any other issues we can help with. Have a great semester!

[katharine_lalis]

Hello, I'm having the same problem.  The image is not locked or restricted.  It is saved in my files on Canvas as a jpeg and I added it using the embed images icon.  The same failed image is showing up for my students as was showing up for the question askers students. Any advise on what I can do?

Thanks!

[Stef_retired]

 @katharine_lalis ‌, you stated that the image is saved in "my files." If you mean your personal files space, then that's the problem; students cannot access another user's personal files. Try re-uploading the image to the course files space (navigating to the course itself, clicking on the Files tab in the course navigation, and uploading it there) and re-embedding it; students should then be able to see it.

[katharine_lalis]

Hi Stefanie,

The are in the course files.  I didn't even know there was an option to put personal files in Canvas.  Sorry for the confusion.

Any other suggestions?

[Stef_retired]

 @katharine_lalis ‌, this might ultimately be a question for Canvas Support, but I would first try using the Content Selector (the panel that appears at the right side of the page when you click Edit) instead of the Embed Image icon in the RCE to re-embed the image into wherever you want it (you didn't specify where it is, but I would assume it's in a page or discussion prompt or assignment instructions). If that doesn't work, submit a ticket so a support tech can have a look at the specifics. Please refer to https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10459-415265830?sr=search&searchId=10bbe6dd-698e-4a87-9f93-...‌

[katharine_lalis]

Thanks for following up. I’ll try this and check in with my students!

[lawiseman]

For my student using the BLEND / Canvas app on an iPad, we had to access the "Student" app settings through the usual iPad Settings function (gray gear icon).

Fairly far down the left column, the app is listed as "Student" (instead of BLEND or Canvas or any other recognizable name), with the usual red sunburst-looking icon.

Tapping that icon allows me to allow cross-website tracking, and I also selected "reset cache on next launch" for fun.

Somewhere between these changes and also enabling cross-website tracking in Safari, I got my student's images to load

Good luck!

[alexandra_moral]

I am having this issue with questions from a previous question bank. On my end, it shows up with the images, and they show up under student preview as well. When the students go to take the test the image shows up as "uploaded image" with the attached icon.

[DeanLivelybrook]

OK, I have a course copied from last year.  It did copy the images (*.png files), they show up under Files and can be seen as images there.  When looking at Quizzes for these assignments, using Safari, the images show up as locked images.  They have been copied successfully from the previous course, I don't think that's the problem.  Also, when I pull up the same (copied) course using Firefox as a browser, the images are visible and OK.  I conclude this is an issue with Safari.  I've explored several setting under Preferences in Safari, including the known fix of unchecking the 'Prevent cross-site tracking' box under Privacy.  This doesn't work, and I've been unable to find a Safari setting to change in order to resolve this pernicious behavior.  Last year in teaching the course that was copied, I had a few students complain about the same problem.  Yes, they can right click the image and see it in a new window, but that's a really crappy solution (especially when one is posing a multiple-choice response question involving (say) 5 images to choose from.  Can Instructure/Canvas folks please get with Apple folks and resolve this?  (I don't want to have to go through and replace/fix 100's of images.)

[ericg · Accepted solution]

I have had the same problem but found a weird workaround (at least for my case).

1. Have the students open the quiz and then right-click on any broken image icon.  A context menu should pop up and in that menu they should select "open in a new tab" or "view" or "download", depending on the browser.
2. The students should then totally ignore that new tab or viewed image.  On one type of browser it asked to navigate away from the page.  This is OK.
3. Finally, the students should then just refresh the browser quiz page.  For those that had to navigate away, just enter the quiz again.  For my students, all the missing images then magically loaded on the quiz.

I hope that this helps someone diagnose the problem and maybe find a better cure!

[jamie_steck]

I am currently having this same issue.  My students are not able to see images I have inserted into quiz questions.  I can see them in student view.  The questions have been moved from one question bank to another.  They worked fine in my course last semester.  Would that affect the visibility?

[jerra_strong · Accepted solution]

Hi, if you copied the course, it's possible the images were not copied along, and the link for these images actually points to the old course (you have access to the old course, your students don't).  If you right-click the image in your browser and use "Inspect Element", or the equivalent in your browser, you might see something like this in the code (the img means image).

<img src="https://yourschool.instructure.com/courses/1234/photo.jpg" ..... >

Make sure the courses/1234 part matches what you see when you are on the course homepage of your course (in the address bar at the top of the screen).  If the numbers are different, the images are in the wrong course and need to be fixed!

[bbaumgartner]

I have had this problem on and off your years and it's the first time it was pointed out that the image source could be the problem. Sure enough, with one of the images not displayed to students in a quiz it was from an outside source. Now I will have to go back and check quizzes for that! 

[mcovill]

This is a recurring problem at our college; a student will have a quiz where only some of the images load..  Even when quiz setting are correct and images are in the correct files, every week there will be students who have the problem where the image will not show up on their quiz (even though it seems to work for other students).  Sometimes changing browsers works (explorer and safari seem to have the most problems, chrome the fewest), sometimes it is a matter of having the student try again later that day (this doesn't work for everyone's quiz protocols...after all the student has already seen part of the quiz.  It is very frustrating.  Based on how tedious and multi-stepped it is to insert images into quiz questions (at least without something like Respondus4.0) it is seems like Canvas wasn't well designed for image-based quizzes.

[bbaumgartner]

Check Jerra_Strong's comment in this thread, that appears to be the issue (the images are not stored in the Canvas course folder).

[cindyk]

This just happened to us today in classic quizzes.  Earlier in the week, students successfully took the quiz with no problems.  Today, not one of the images loaded.  See attached images a student sent.  When I dug really deep into the files, I discovered that NOT ONE of the images copied from another Canvas course were published.  I individually published over a 100 images from questions in the question bank to get the student up and going but this is unacceptable going forward.

When I viewed the original import from a QTI file, none of those images were published either.  We use Examview and export via a QTI file.  We have permission to use these images and I should not have to manually touch all the images for every quiz.

Please fix this.

[cindyk · Accepted solution]

After much trouble-shooting, it appears the issue is about using iPads and Safari.  Apple interferes with image content and does not load them.  We have to change settings on the iPads and effectively disable Safari.  Then the images load.  I am curious if this issues appears in other circumstances.

[hito]

This has something to do with the browser cache. It would be nice for canvas support to really look into this and figure it out. Yes, it only occurs when I import a quiz from a different course. However, some images in the same quiz will load and others will not, which doesn't make sense, since all the images got imported from a different course. It only happens to some images. Usually, if a student uses an incognito browser/private browser, the images will load. However, the most recent time this happened, it wasn't the cache (incognito wasn't fixing it), and I had to re-upload the images. But then after I re-uploaded, it still wasn't showing up unless the cache was cleared/using incognito or private browsing mode. It's so strange and frustrating because I can't seem to figure out the pattern. I always find out about the problem after students have come across the issue, rather than being able to fix them preemptively. 

[gretchen]

We continue to experience this same issue, regardless of how or in which content type the image was embedded (page, assignment, quiz, etc.). Some images show while others do not and the "missing" images are not consistent across users.

I've been through several rounds of conversations with support on this where we look at individual students' logs. The only consistency we have identified is users on an outdated mobile app or using Safari 13 or 14. Updating the mobile Canvas Student app or switching to Chrome has solved it every time for us.

It would be nice to remove Safari from the list of compatible browsers if it won't work consistently. Additionally, some sort of banner in the mobile apps to alert users when updates are available would save a lot of us a lot of time.

[NickNafster79]

This issue is happening with my courses in Chrome on Chromebooks. The images are in the course folder.

[CynthiaEdwards1]

I found my solution! Maybe this will help others! The image file was marked "available to students with link," which made lockdown browser kick it back. It needs to be simply published.

[TracyBennett]

I navigated to this area in the files but it only lets me change it to Unpublish or Schedule Availability. I changed it to these options but they didn't correct the problem.