Word not displaying pictures

Question

We are working on live SharePoint Word documents that have a lot of images, are lengthy and which many contributors work in simultaneously and edit. Therefore, there can be 300+ versions of the document (stored in version history). Sometimes it happens that at one point in the document, instead of images that were normally displayed up to that point, we get the "picture can't be displayed" error message within a white square. We are using Office 365 and we have checked that "Show picture placeholders" is disabled in Word -> Options-> Advanced, and that "Show drawings and text boxes on screen" is enabled as well as "Print drawings created in Word" is enabled under Display-Printing options.

What can be the reason for that error suddenly appearing in the document?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Hi

Did you ever find a solution?

I have a similar issue:

In Word 365 Images are not shown despite that they are properly embedded.
Same document opened in Word 2019 (or OfficeLibre Writer) works fine, all images are there.

Answer 2

None of these solutions work. Anyone else find a resolution to the issue?

Answer 3

I believe recent Window Updates have been causing issues with image displays...

The following, run as admin on CMD has fixed a few issues... but alas not the Word issue - which I too have.

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft.NETFramework\Windows Presentation Foundation\XPSAllowedTypes" /v "DisableDec2022Patch" /t REG_SZ /d "*" /reg:64

Answer 4

Hi @JosipaVuk
Do you open the word document in browser or in client application?

I have found an article about the error “This image cannot currently be displayed” which contains the reasons such as word wrapping style picture placeholder is enabledand, other settings and solutions for them:
https://www.remosoftware.com/info/solution-fix-word-document-not-showing-pictures

You could open the document in client application and try the methods provided in the article, hope it will help you.

Note: Microsoft is providing this information as a convenience to you. The sites are not controlled by Microsoft. Microsoft cannot make any representations regarding the quality, safety, or suitability of any software or information found there. Please make sure that you completely understand the risk before retrieving any suggestions from the above link.

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Answer 5

I am also having this issue. Only two people currently collaborating on a 20mb document and Word fails constantly.
It occurs at points of shift in user activity, where you see the majority of images disappear, the document significantly drop in size, leading to loss of data.
Fortunately the restore function enable recovery of the images (This is a doctoral thesis so quite a few).

Could this be a memory issue from one of the editors?

Frankly it has made the collaboration feature of oneDrive/Sharepoint a complete disaster.

Chris.