Disappearing Images!

Date : June 14, 2011 By brookwarner

Ok, so after months of frustration, I am still no closer to solving this issue.

Here’s the back story:

As I have mentioned in an earlier post, I am currently working on a project called “2ndcity”. Part of my role was to create the website. This worked well, until the site grew to a point where we made the call to shift to a (wordpress) multisite install. The reason for this was because we had three very separate target audiences for our product, and we wanted to customise each site towards each particular audience.

So, I made the transition to:

The transition went well, after following some helpful tutorials both on the wordpress codex and on some other blogs. My trouble started when I began to add ‘featured images’ to my posts on any of the sub-folder sites. The image would load, but then as soon as the page finished loading, the image would ‘break’.

I soon realised that this was a Google Chrome only issue, as it was not occurring in any other browser. I also realised that I was not alone, and many other people were having some version of this issue.

So, after months of detective work, I am closer, but the actual issue is not solved. Here is what I have deduced so far:

• This is not a TimThumb.php issue, since this is also happening to any image that I upload.
• If I reduce the image size (say to 150×150) then on some sites, it works (and the images persist). On others, some images persist, some disappear, and on others none persist.
• The image is definitely “there”, since opening the broken image icon in a new tab reveals the image, as well as the fact that it appears in other browsers.
• The file type makes no difference
• The image file size makes no difference
• Clearing the cache makes no difference
• Removing “content-length’ from the headers makes no difference.
• I don’t believe that this is a htaccess error, as all permalinks are working, the images are there, and, once again, it works in all other browsers.
• I have disabled CSS and JS, and it makes no difference
• The google chrome inspector says “failed to load resource”