Why won't images migrate?

[fritzs]

When migrating to new quizzes, my images embedded in questions will not load. Question content, created as image, will just show up blank.

[scole2]

It's sad that "they" come up with this amazing "new Quizes" ,you have a VALID question that we are all facing and ........ no response..... Sadness..... 

[keliim25858e]

I get this with Fill in the Blanks, where else are you seeing this? I'm trying to problem solve before I publish my support docs.

@scole2 @fritzs 

[mappelhans]

This is a travesty. Our department has numerous quizzes (homework, quizzes, tests) and Canvas is changing this to a format with basically no migration/transition support. Images are not migrating, and I just read that formulas are going to be migrated as images. This "new quizzes" transition has basically destroyed years of work. We will need to spend hundreds of hours reprogramming thousands of problems.

Why? The programmers/designers at Instructure are incompetent, or they don't care, or they're saving money? Our jobs are difficult enough to where we shouldn't have to recreate the wheel because our LMS can't import/export. I'm angry because this is totally unacceptable. We need to make our Deans and Vice Chancellors, etc., aware of this so they can put pressure on Instructure, or even threaten to "migrate" to another LMS. Moodle is looking good right now. 

The squeaky wheel gets the grease. If enough teachers/institutions express that the current migration tools/methods are unacceptable, and threaten to switch to another LMS platform, they will work harder to fix this. Think of all the teachers, all the institutions, and all the assignments. This is likely millions of labor hours (billions in wages) that could be saved if they worked through this transition properly. 

In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions about migrating images, formulas/equations, or anything else that is failing, our department would appreciate it. 

[hesspe]

In my limited experience with New Quizzes, questions with embedded images (png, jpeg, gif) do carry over when a Classic Quiz is migrated to a New Quiz.  Can you be more specific about how and where this isn't working.

[mappelhans]

Well, this increases the ridiculousness of the travesty, because your comment suggests that it works sometimes.

My situation is straightforward. I have quizzes in Quizzes. There are images organized in folders in Files. Faculty, staff, and students (and myself) can view the images in the quizzes when they click on them from their respective accounts. This has been working for years. 

When I migrate the quiz, after a while it's new version appears with the shaded rocket. Within Build or Preview, the image links are broken; only the name of the file shows.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi there, @mappelhans ...

This is complete speculation on my part...realizing that I cannot access your course content to help troubleshoot...but I thought of one possibility.  Like @hesspe, I have not experienced broken images when migrating a Classic Quiz to a New Quiz.  (By the way, I am a Canvas administrator at my school.)  In your Classic Quiz, could you confirm that the pathname of an image in a quiz question has the same Course ID number which should match the URL of your course?  For example, if you had an embedded image in a quiz, that path name might look like:

<p><img id="112358" src="/courses/12345/files/112358/preview" alt="Olaf.jpg" width="300" height="169" /></p>

So, for example, my course URL would be:

https://SchoolName.instructure.com/courses/12345

The Course ID (which I've bolded above) should match the first number you see after "src" in the HTML code above.  If it doesn't, then I wonder if the image was copied and pasted from one course to another (generally not good practice, IMHO).  And so maybe this is a reason that the images aren't migrating for you properly?

Anyway...I hope this makes sense.  And again, it's just one hunch I had thought of when I first read your question.  So, I wanted to try and help rule out any other possibilities.  Hope this might help in your investigation of the issue!

[hesspe]

I have been able to replicate this issue reliably for Multiple-Fill-in-the-Blank in Classic Quiz when they migrate to fill-in-the-blank questions in New Quizzes.  This seems to be the case regardless of whether it is a Course image or an Uploaded image.  As with many many behaviors in New Quizzes, it's not something that most people will run into, but for those who do, it will really bite hard.  The only reasonable solution - and one which Instructure will not consider - is to support both New and Classic Quizzes indefinitely.  The can't say it can't be done, because they are doing it now.  The only other question types I've tried are MC and single FIB, and those both seem to work.

[mappelhans]

@Chris_Hofer Thanks for speculating, but a couple of things. Firstly, I've had these image problems before and I've checked the html coding to verify addresses/paths are correct. I've worked with admin on these problems before, and I'm familiar with the syntax. But this brings up another issue. Why are image references getting corrupted in the first place? Why should exporting a course package or QTI and then importing it cause problems? We've had these issues before, and the image handling is shoddy at best.

In fact, copying an entire course seems to be the best option, i.e., we get images to show in the copied course. However, doing a quiz export/import gives problems- broken image links. It seems when a quiz export is performed, images stored in the file structure don't get copied, or their address references are corrupted in the imported file so that the images are not referencing correctly. And to be sure, images are either inserted from the file system, or uploaded into the problem question from an external source (not copied/pasted)--both of which are recommended and supported functions for including images.

There seems to be a similar issue here--images are not being copied (for some mysterious reason) when the quiz is migrated, or more appropriately, the reference address is getting corrupted. And the most frustrating point is that it happens sometimes and not others. And I probably know a lot more than most teachers, since I'm familiar with LMS systems (BB, Canvas, Moodle) and some coding. What are other teachers going to do when then experience these difficulties? I hope they flood their admin and Instructure with emails and comments!

So I reiterate. Canvas has a shoddy, temperamental coding for handling images. They shouldn't offer faculty the ability to include them in their questions, and offer them export/import options that don't function properly. Faculty shouldn't be expected to have to know details about coding, OSs, etc. In fact, if the program allows a teacher to copy and paste an image into a question, it should have a robust way of dealing with it! One of the most important rules of coding, or programming in general, is designing a "dummy" proof program. Either simplify and restrict the code and its abilities so that it always functions, or provide the functionality but ensure the code is robust enough to handle it.

This leads me to have to be in disagreement with your Honest Opinion about "good practices." No offense, but that's a bit elitist. Although personally I don't copy and paste images (although the program allows this), the teaching public should not have to have knowledge of what a program can and cannot do. It is the responsibility of the designers to ensure their program can deliver what it offers, what it allows. Which is part of my point here, because the program is not functioning properly, even with "best practices" employed, which is supposed to be within its own construct!

@hesspeI agree 100% that Canvas should keep employing the two formats.

Even if only 1% of teachers have significant migration difficulties, this still amounts to an unacceptable loss of time and wages (see above) for the people in this community. In addition, even if the current migration worked perfectly, it still represents a huge time investment, for something that a lot of us won't even care about! I can only hope that the community puts pressure on Canvas to either keep both formats, or at the least, offer reliable transitioning tools.

[Chris_Hofer]

@mappelhans ...

I can understand some of your frustrations with New Quizzes.  Although I have not experienced exactly what you have described in your posts, I have experienced some strange things with New Quizzes such as the image file names completely changing...sometimes to long strings of characters...which completely baffles me.  See my two submitted Feature Ideas here for more context:

• Files Attached to New Quizzes Questions - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)
• Renamed Files after Migrating a Classic Quiz to a ... - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

I was also a bit confused on your process for migrating the quizzes from Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes...so I am hoping you might be able to shed a little more light on this.  You indicated that you are doing a quiz export/import (I assume exporting from course "Settings" and then importing into New Quizzes?)?  Is that correct?  Is this the main way you are handling things at the moment?  Are you taking advantage of the "Migrate" option available on the "Quizzes" index page (which I realize you'd need to do per quiz)?  How do I migrate a Canvas quiz to New Quizzes? - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)  Also, I'm not sure if you've seen or tried this, but have you seen the new Feature Options in your school's "test" Canvas environment that allow for quiz migration as part of a course import?  They look like this:

These are options that I see at the Canvas account level in our "test" Canvas environment.  What is the Canvas test environment?

Maybe this would be another option for you to try as it relates to those broken images?  Again, just trying to provide some other possibilities here for you...and rule out anything you may have already tried.

Finally, as it relates to my "best practice" wording, it's been my experience as a LMS admin for the past 21+ years (Canvas since around 2014) where I've seen some of our own instructors who have copied and pasted links from one course to another.  Doing so copies over the CourseIDs from one course to another.  So, students in the new course would have a link pointing to an old course they weren't enrolled in...causing images to appear broken for them.  This is why I almost always recommend using tools like the Course Import Tool instead...so that Canvas handles all the details of links and embedded images.

Anyway...I look forward to hearing back from you.  Hope this info is helpful in some way.

[JohnDowis]

I have this issue, and I have found a work around as well as the likely culprit. I noticed one of my quizzes had some pictures that would migrate and some that would not, so I opened the original quiz, then clicked on the html button </> to inspect the picture link. I attached two pictures showing the code that worked and the one that didn't.

So I just changed the last part of the link from the "/download..." stuff to just "/preview", then migrated again and it worked. So now I have to go through all of my quizzes, check every picture link for any ending that starts with "download" and replace it with "preview", and when I migrate it works.

Now my Questions:

1. How are these different html links created for images? I didn't make these quizzes originally, so I am not sure what method was used to insert a picture and which method made the bad link type, but my course is full of literally hundreds of them that I have to manually change now before migrating.

2. Can you guys please fix the migrate tool to handle this obviously simple issue? If I can open it and change the text of the link to fix it, then you can fix it in the migrate tool. After all, the image displays fine in the original quiz with either link type.