Upgrade problems.
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First, wordpress forced me to upgrade Chrome, which meant I was forced to upgrade my mac to High Sierra. Now, I don’t seem to have permission to edit my own posts, and all the images have a second icon next to them. How do I fix this mess?
WP.com: Yes
Correct account: YesThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Please try these two things:
1. Try clearing your browser’s cache and cookies.
2. Try with all browser extensions or add-ons temporarily disabled.
Please let us know how each step goes for you, and which browser (and version of) you’re using if you’re still having trouble.
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I cleared just the cache, and the edit permission problem went away.
All my posts have the icon thing still, a little “missing image” icon next to the actual image. I was able to click on and delete the missing image icon, leaving the real image there, then update. However I have hundreds of these things scattered through my posts.
Note that this problem occurs now when I just go view my site, not just in edit. I can see where I removed one such icon from the top post.
Chrome Version 96.0.4664.55 (Official Build) (x86_64)
macOS High Sierra 10.13.6
I am reluctant to clear cookies… might try later, but this does seem to be something imbedded in the documents, since it can be removed.
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All my posts have the icon thing still, a little “missing image” icon next to the actual image.
Would you please use https://snipboard.io/ to share a screenshot of what you’re seeing?
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Hi there,
So when did the broken images appear for you? Looking at your activity log, there appears to have been a purge of quite of few image attachments which may have caused the broken images. Did you happen to delete a ton of media images from your library about a year ago?
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I did not ever do a large purge of images. A year ago sounds like when there was a different change to WordPress, and the image addition process changed – back when block editing became the thing.
I was definitely good in April this year, with none of those broken images showing anywhere. Sometime this summer, when WordPress required the upgrade in Chrome, I lost the ability to upload. I finally upgraded now in November (now that I have something I want to post), and these extra broken images appeared – matched up one-to-one with the real images.
p.s. I have about 200 images in my library, and each is used multiple times in my posts.
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Thinking on it, I’m afraid that when WordPress upgraded itself, it changed how it presented images, and did not go back and change the backlog of images in older posts. This is really not acceptable, to screw up all those historic posts.
I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve seen lots of this sort of thing over the years.
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Hi there,
I’m afraid that when WordPress upgraded itself, it changed how it presented images, and did not go back and change the backlog of images in older posts. This is really not acceptable, to screw up all those historic posts.
Because the images you point out on your site were deleted over time (spread out over several sessions that are days apart) this does not appear to be related to any major platform updates but rather due to the actions we see taken while logged in under your account. This is something that is confirmed in our logs:
Someone, logged in as you, deleted the images in batches over a few days.Unfortunately we are not able to restore images after they are deleted in this fashion, so we are not able to assist in this regard. If you wish you can upload the images again and add them back to your blog posts, but we do not have another method for restoring them on our end.
Let us know if you need further assistance or if you have any questions.
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I’m sorry but your explanation does not hold water.
Every post of mine prior to Oct 27, 2020 is fine.
Every post beginning Oct 27, 2020 has exactly one broken icon for every image present. One-for-one. And none of the images that were supposed to be present have been deleted. This is ten posts, each with a few dozen images.
This is not something I did, it is something in the software.
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Hi again,
Firstly thank you for clarifying that older posts were affected. I can now see that there may be another issue at play here, one that is not related to the image deletion activity we see in your activity logs. I really appreciate your persistence here. :)
Looking at those older posts more closely I see that they are unaffected, but it’s not clear what is causing the “phantom missing images” in more recent posts. It seems that it may be related to your theme (which was retired some years ago) or the way in which you are adding content to your site.
Out of curiosity, in the past (before switching to the new editor) did you compose your entire posts in the WordPress editor? Or did you copy and past content from another source like a Word Doc, email, or another website possibly?
If not that is fine but I’d like to rule it out as a variable as we continue to investigate. Thanks for the additional info!
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I have always composed these pages on Word, including the images. I paste them whole into the wordpress page, and the images do not come over. I then have to add the images back in one at a time.
While it is possible there is some invisible residual image coming over, and behaving differently in different time periods, it never showed up before now.
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Hi there,
Thanks for the details on how you compose the posts.
Word processors like MS Word and web browsers and editors, like we use on WordPress.com, use two completely different coding languages to represent text content. When you copy content from a word processor, the editor tries to translate that content into HTML code so browsers will be able to display it, but that doesn’t always work properly.
A very notable difference between the two in this case lies in how images are treated. In a Word file, when you insert an image, it gets embedded into the document and the image becomes part of the document itself.
But on a website, the images you see aren’t part of the page itself. Rather, those images are stored in a media folder on the site’s server, or sometimes even on a completely separate media server, and the actual web page only contains a link telling the browser where it can fetch that image.
When you copy a file including images from Word, the WordPress editor will attempt to upload those images to the media library so they can be used in the post. But sometimes that doesn’t work, and that’s what has happened here – the image failed to upload, but the underlying HTML for the image was still created in the post. But because the image didn’t make it to the media library, no link exists for it. If the browser sees the HTML code for an image, but there’s no link to fetch the image from, it shows a blank placeholder like you’re seeing.
That this only started happening consistently since 27 October points to something changing. I’ve checked our internal changelogs, and can’t see any changes to the editor around that date, so something likely changed in Word with a software update on their end that’s now preventing the editor from properly importing the image when you paste it.
To fix your posts that have been affected by this, edit the post in the editor, click on the blank image, and press backspace. That will remove the HTML for the blank image, but won’t remove any images from your media library.
To prevent this going forward, consider not adding images to your initial Word file, but only add those to your post in the editor after you’ve pasted in the text content.
Alternatively you can also use the feature built into Word that lets you post directly to your blog from within Word, i.e. without any copy-pasting. That should prevent this issue, and any other formatting issues that commonly occur when pasting from a word processor.
You can find Word’s instructions for setting this up here:
The link you’ll add to Word to connect your site is
https://themoinsights.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.phpLet us know if you have any more questions about this.
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Thank you for getting to the bottom of this.
fyi – Word continues to do this behavior after all updates. Sadly, the broken icon image CANNOT be put into the chrome search function.
Perhaps WordPress would consider implementing a search-and-destroy function for this HTML string?
On a positive note for the future, having these “markers” actually makes it easier to find where I need to REPLACE them with an image, rather than just INSERT via reference to the original document.
Thank you again.
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(by “all updates” I did not mean to include implementing your solution. Sorry. I will try that.)
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Hi there,
Perhaps WordPress would consider implementing a search-and-destroy function for this HTML string?
Looking at the source code (raw HTML) there is nothing about the phantom image that is possible to target and remove in a programatic fashion. Each bit of HTML was just unique enough to prevent that.
The good news is I was able to semi-automate finding the invalid HMTL in your site source and removing it manually once it was located. If you visit your site you should no longer see the image issue.
As @kokkieh mentions, going forward you will need to find a new way to bring content over so this does not continue to happen. We will not be able to remove these phantom images going forward.
Hope this helps and thanks for rocking WordPress.com! :)
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Thanks. I got about half of them, then the other half mysteriously disappeared. Mystery solved. Have a happy holiday….
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