Please help,"The image part with relationship ID rld12 was not found in the file" on my word document.

Question

I turned up an assignment that was supposed to have images as proof, got feedback that they didn't exist and sure enough they didn't. Majority of the screen shots i uploaded display the above message. I tried the recommenced strategy of turning the document into a .zip and rummaging through the files but the images arent in the media folder. Id really appreciate if someone had a fix cause i really dont wanna do this whole assignment again.

Answer 1

Dear @Ryan,

According to the error message, I did find various of similar thread in this community, and it seems that it is a common issue in Office apps including Word, Excel, etc.

Firstly, I recommend you try again these steps in this official article which shows how to fix it in a Word document: "The image part with relationship rID8 was not found" error in Microsoft Word (but use rId12 instead of rId8).

Note: Always work on documents and save them when they are located on the local drive and then, after closing the document, use the File Explorer to copy it to the External drive.

Moreover, to better narrow down the case so that we can determine that whether it is caused by the file, the program or the PC’s environment, would you mind providing the following information?

• To help narrow down what caused the images to disappear, could you please share a bit more detail on the points below?
• How were the screenshots originally added to the Word document? Did you use Insert > Pictures, or were they copied and pasted / dragged into the file?
• Did you save the document directly from Word to some form of removable media (USB Drive, External Hard DIsk, SD Card, etc) or in a cloud location (such as OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, or email) at the time you inserted them?
• Were you working on the document across multiple devices (for example, starting on one computer and finishing on another), or only on a single device?
• Was the document saved in a cloud‑synced folder (such as OneDrive), and did you notice any sync errors or interruptions while working on it?
• Does the problem occur in all files or in several specified files? If you insert the affected images into a Word document, will the same problem occur to it?

Note: Please understand that as a forum moderator, my role is to provide general guidance and troubleshooting support. I don’t have access to internal systems or backend tools, and I appreciate your understanding of these limits.

I hope the information shared helps point you in the right direction. Please try the steps above and let me know if they work. If not, we can continue working together to narrow this down.

The first response may not always resolve the issue right away, but with your help and more details, we can work toward a solution.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. I'm looking forward for your reply.

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Answer 2

The error means Word has a reference to an image (for example rId12) but the actual image file is missing from the document package. If the image is not present in the word/media folder after renaming the file to .zip, there is no way to restore that image from the document itself; it has already been lost.

The XML-based repair method only works when:

• The relationship entry exists (for example, rId8), and
• The corresponding image file is still present in the media folder, but the Target is incorrectly set (for example, Target="NULL").

In that scenario, the fix is:

1. Rename .docx to .zip.
2. Open the .zip and go to word/_rels.
3. Edit document.xml.rels and find the relationship ID (for example, rId8).
4. Replace Target="NULL" with the correct path to the image in the media folder (for example, Target="media/yourimagename.jpeg").
5. Save, close, rename back to .docx, and reopen in Word.

Because the images are not in the media folder in this case, there is no supported method to recover them from the file. The only practical options are:

• Reinsert the original screenshots from wherever they were first captured/saved, or
• Recreate the screenshots and reinsert them into a new or repaired copy of the document.

To reduce the chance of this happening again:

• After inserting images, save and immediately reopen the document to confirm they appear correctly.
• Keep a backup copy of the document and, if possible, the original image files used for the assignment.

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References:

• "The image part with relationship rID8 was not found" error in Microsoft Word