Images disappeared again today

[WynSnow]

Today, images again disappeared from my odt file. I have read the other posts about disappearing images, and have now changed various memory options for AOO Writer, and have also edited my graphics for smaller file sizes. So I hope this won't happen to me again. However, I may have a clue that would help folks fix the underlying bug. (This is the second time images have disappeared from a file for me.)

Today's circumstances: I had a file with approximately 60 images that I saved with a different filename. I then proceeded to change the "new" file, removing most of its pages (and corresponding images, which were 1 per page). When I also opened the previous file, most of its images had disappeared, and were replaced by a rectangle that said [file read error]. (Or similar error message about graphic cannot be displayed.) When I closed the "previous" file and reopened it (I might have saved the file in the interim -- clearly an error on my part), when I reopened the file, instead of the rectangle and error message, the affected images were simply gone. The ones still in the file appear to be images that I had inserted into other odt documents. The images that disappeared seem to be those that I deleted from the "saved as" different filename document. At least, that seems to be the case today.

The previous time that images disappeared, it may have been related to the fact that I moved images from one folder to another and may also have renamed some. I believe, however, that I went through the same process as today -- that I saved a file with a new filename, then proceeded to edit it and remove some of its images. When I then opened the "original" file, those corresponding images were replaced with this rectangle-and-error-message. When I tried to insert those same pictures again, I still got the rectangle and error message. Only when I closed and reopened the file was it possible to reinsert the pictures.

This suggests that if I do a "save as new filename", I should possibly close AOO and then reopen it before editing the new, saved-as new-filename document. Do the forum folks think this would prevent the image-disappearing behavior? Perplexed me =

This happened both on my current AOO version (4.1.2) and on my previous version, I dunno which one that was.

[John_Ha]

Welcome to the forum - and I am sorry we meet under such circumstances as your losing content.

Have a look at Re: Help!! Document Replaced with Blank Page - force error where I can force the loss of content. ARe you sure you left enough time for the file to completely write before opening or re-opening it?

Let's call the two files Previous and Different. You say the images were gone in Previous. Was the file the same size, meaning the images were there, but not brought into the page? Or was it smaller, meaning the images were not in the file? Or unzip the .odt and look at the Pictures folder - are all images in it?

Are you embedding images, so the image itself is stored in the .odt? Or are you linking images, so the images stay in the folders on the disk, and Writer fetches them by name. If the latter, which you do by Insert > Picture from file > and tick Link, and you delete pictures from a folder the pictures will disappear from the document. Also, I think the .odt stores the path as a relative path and this needs to be kept constant. I don't link so have no direct experience of it.

If you are linking, then you copied the file, so both Previous and Different point to the same folder of images. If you delete an image in that folder, it will disappear in both files.

Check the up to date Writer guide and/or the OOo v3.3 Writer Manual on images. The manual says:

Linking an image file

If the Link option in the Insert picture dialog is selected, OOo creates a link to the file containing the image instead of saving a copy of the image in the document. The result is that the image is displayed in the document, but when the document is saved, it contains only a reference to the image file—not the image itself. The document and the image remain as two separate files, and they are merged together only when you open the document again.

Linking an image has two advantages and one disadvantage:

• Advantage – Linking can reduce the size of the document when it is saved, because the image file itself is not included. File size is usually not a problem on a modern computer with a reasonable amount of memory, unless the document includes many large graphics files; OOo can handle quite large files.

• Advantage – You can modify the image file separately without changing the document because the link to the file remains valid, and the modified image will appear when you next open the document. This can be a big advantage if you (or someone else, perhaps a graphic artist) is updating images.

• Disadvantage – If you send the document to someone else, or move it to a different computer, you must also send the image files, or the receiver will not be able to see the linked images. You need to keep track of the location of the images and make sure the recipient knows where to put them on another machine, so the document can find them. For example, you might keep images in a subfolder named Images (under the folder containing the document); the recipient of the file needs to put the images in a subfolder with the same name (under the folder containing the document).

Note

When inserting the same image several times in the document it would appear beneficial to create links; however, this is not necessary as OOo embeds in the document only one copy of the image file.

Embedding linked images

If you originally linked the images, you can easily embed one or more of them later if you wish. To do so:

1) Open the document in OpenOffice.org and choose Edit > Links.
2) The Edit Links dialog shows all the linked files. In the Source file list, select the files you want to change from linked to embedded.
3) Click the Break Link button.
4) Save the document.

Note

Going the other way, from embedded to linked, is not so easy—you must delete and reinsert each image, one at a time, selecting the Link option when you do so.

[WynSnow]

Hi John_Ha,

Thank you for your swift response! And yes, sorry to meet under such circumstances, too. I've been very happy with AOO aside from this problem happening for a second time -- and of course it means I have to reinsert pictures since they are Gonzo, which is a Huge Nuisance. Answers to your questions:

Re linked vs embedded. Menu Insert > Picture > File. And the link box is not checked. So embedded. (I never noticed that "linked" was there as an option, so had never checked it.) As further proof they are embedded, last night I changed the name of one of the folders in the full path to these images, and all the images I reinserted are still there. And they are all jpg's, not png's or bmp's or some other format.

Re enough time for file to be saved: I'm reasonably sure there was enough time to finish the save of Different file with the new name. After my "save as", I then took out more than 40 pages while editing Different. OTOH, I might not have saved this edited Different file before reopening Previous.

Re file size, I simply don't know. I did not take note of the Previous file size when it had all the images. Though I could take a look once I finish reinserting the images to see what that file size is.

Re unzip the .odt and look at Pictures folder -- I have no clue how to go about that.

I had another thought about the problem. Is it possible there is some sort of issue with the "undo" memory? In other words, since the list of undo actions for Different includes going back to Previous, would that create any problems for reopening Previous and the two possibly sharing the same "file" of undo actions? I'm nowhere near enough of a coder to know an answer to that, simply enough that the idea occurs to me. And, there could be a clue in that the images that stayed in Previous were the same ones that I kept in Different. (At least this time around. The previous occurrence of this was sufficiently long ago that I simply don't remember details. I do remember that only some of the images were gone both times, not all of them.)

Also, I did have about 5 or 6 other AOO files open. I'm not sure of file sizes on any of them, though I could look if you think that's important. I also had a bunch of other programs open, and my Mac Pro is 6 years old. It has 5 G of memory installed, and under storage it says it has 110.26 GB free of 639.28 GB. Looking at Activity Monitor, the CPU load looks fine. Of course, I'm not doing much at the moment. Looking at Activity Monitor Memory, the cache has 725.1 MB and the Swap Used is 237.8 MB. App Memory is 1.89 GB, Wired Memory is 1,012 and Compressed is 1.38 GB. (Dunno if any of that might be either important or relevant. I include it since I know that "old" machines can have "issues" with such stuff.)

Would you like me to try to see if I can reproduce the problem? I still have Previous (adding the pictures back in), and will happily save a duplicate backup into a backup folder. So I could do another save as, making sure there's plenty of time to complete the file-write, and then remove a bunch of images and see what happens when I reopen Previous.


BTW, what do those Post Icons mean? the checkmark, pink face, and something that looks like radioactive?

[John_Ha]

Thanks.

To unzip, download a free zip utility - on Windows I use 7-Zip. The .odt file is actually a zipped file - when you unzip it you see this:

I very much doubt it is an "undo" problem. The PC looks fine (better than mine ), other Writer files being open shouldn't affect it.

It would be very helpful if you could reproduce it as we would all love to force this fault, if it is a fault, to be fully reproduceable so we could get it fixed!

The smilies? Hover over them to get the name ... click one to enter it into your post at the cursor.

[WynSnow]

Again, thanks for such a swift reply!

Alas, I could not reproduce the problem. I had Original (Previous) open, did a save as to Different filename, edited some stuff in Different (including removing pages and images as before), reopened Previous -- and all the images were there. I will watch for it happening again, and if it does, I will add to this thread (hopefully having remembered exactly what I was doing at the time). Maybe the issue was limits set in Preferences -- the ones I expanded based on other posts about disappearing images.

I found my "unzipper" and tried that. Of course, having re-inserted all the missing images, the Pictures folder contains them all. But I will remember this in case of future problems. Curiously, all the images had today's date (presumably because I saved the file today) even though several images had been inserted a couple of weeks ago.

Re post icons -- not the smilies but the row of icons above "Subject". Options are None, a green checkmark, a pink somewhat angry-ish face, and a white circle with three triangles in it (looks either radioactive or a reel of magnetic tape). Nothing appears when I hover over them. I'm guessing the green check mark might mean "Solved"??

[John_Ha]

I don't know. When selected, the icon appears against the subject line in the post being edited ...

[WynSnow]

Drat Pooey! It happened again. I cut two "pages" from one document (let's call it Source) and pasted them into another (let's call it Target). I have saved both files probably more than once. (And I did save a duplicate into a backup folder. I will check to see if that one is okay. Yes, it is, but it was from before today's changes of the cut and paste.)

The two pasted images are gone from Target. Instead, there is a rectangle where the image should be an an error message: "Read-Error". (See attached tiff file of one of the pages. The image had a border, which is still there in the attachment.) I will now go look at the unzipped odt file and see what's there. The other pictures are there in both files. The copy-and-pasted images are not. The text that I cut and pasted is there, but not the images. Perhaps I should not have closed the file (even without saving) before looking at the unzipped file.

If this keeps happening, that will be Very Frustrating.

screen capture of the page with missing image

AOO image gone.tiff (102.52 KiB) Viewed 12177 times

[WynSnow]

Also -- what I was doing at the time. I was modifying a style. It was not the style where the images were anchored, but I was changing the name of a style in the accompanying text. I'm not absolutely sure exactly when the images disappeared. It could have been a little earlier when I was modifying a different style. (But still not the style where the images were anchored.) Thanks for your assistance and supplying suggestions. Looking forward to the next one.

[John_Ha]

Is there any possibility of your uploading the .odt file? That would allow an analysis to be made. Alternatively, if bigger than 128kB, or you don't want it public, PM me (send a Private Message - see PM icon to right) and I will respond with my email ID so you cans end it to me.

For some reason I don't see the TIFF image you uploaded.

[John_Ha]

WynSnow sent me the files. The .odt file had about 50 small images, all embedded, all JPG and quite small (600 x 900 x 24 bit), anchored to a character and set to Optimal page wrap. Total .odt was 1.8 MBytes and when unzipped, the 50 JPG images in Pictures were 1.8 MB (images were 6kB to 90kB). The file was mainly direct formatting, but was well constructed - there manual page breaks at almost every page separating the pages and preventing any spills rippling through to the bottom.

Despite several hours of stress testing with the graphics cache parameters set to very small values, AutoSave and Save a Backup Copy both set to OFF, I was unable to break the files or lose any images from them.

When you get the Read Error like below, it is because Writer cannot find the image file in the Pictures folder, so Writer displays just the area in which the image should be shown. I can force the error by closing Writer, deleting images from the Pictures folder in the .odt file, and re-opening the file. If, and a big if, this is what is happening, the question we all need to answer is why Writer sometimes seems to lose files from this folder

Writer writes (and often updates) the image files its temporary folder while the document is open for editing, especially as I had set Remove from Memory After to 1 minute. It is very noticeable when you scroll the 50 page document that scrolling through the document causes files to be written to ...\AppData\Local\Temp\. Although there were 49 images, the file count in the Temp folder rose to about 90 on occasion.

I then tried a bit of brute force and ignorance and, while Writer was open, I deleted some of the image files in the temporary folder. Writer still saved the .odt file successfully. Note that whereas the file containing the text content was marked by Writer as being open, preventing it from being deleted; the image files were not so marked, and could therefore be deleted even though Writer was using them.

This gave a clue. I shut Writer, restarted it and it opened with a new document which Writer called Untitled 1. Note that this document had never been saved. I then added some images, and deleted some of the temporary image files from the ...\AppData\Local\Temp\ folder. The document still looked perfect on the screen with all images present. I clicked Save and saved the document (as a .odt).

So, the first reproducible way to lose images is to work on a file which has never been saved

1 Create a new document. Do not save it - if you save it as a .odt even once, the images will not be lost
2 Add images
3 Delete the temporary image files in ...\AppData\Local\Temp\
4 File > Save As ..., and save as a .odt file.

The images are missing from the saved .odt file and you get the Read Error message when you open it.

The second reproducible way to lose images is to work on a .doc file which has already been saved, as:

1 Open a .doc file which has images, or to which you add images
2 3 Delete the temporary image files in ...\AppData\Local\Temp\
3 File > Save ..., and save the .doc file.

When I opened the document, the images were not there and I got the Read Error message. Strangely, on reopening the .doc file, I just got grey outlines where the images should have been and no "Read Error". Writer handles .doc files differently from how it handles .odt files.

Possible cause?

If people have configured a "disk clean" application (there are many available) so that it deletes the temporary files in ...\AppData\Local\Temp, then images will be lost in both cases above.

The temporary files which Writer writes in ...\AppData\Local\Temp are set so that Users cannot delete them - they can only Read and Execute them. It requires a user or application with Administrator privilege to delete them. Of course, 99.9% of PC users run with Administrator privilege, so they or any application they run can presumably delete the temporary files. But, whereas the file containing the text content was marked by Writer as being open, preventing it from being deleted; the image files were not so marked, and could therefore be deleted even though Writer was using them.

I think this is a useful route to investigate further for the "My images have disappeared" problem.

Advice to users is therefore

1 Always work in and save Writer documents as .odt files

2 If you File > New ... and create a new document, save it earlier rather than later - once saved, you protect yourself even if you later lose the temporary files in the temp folder because Writer now treats your file as a .odt file.

3 Set the Graphics Cache options as below.

Edit: Another thought which needs more work. Note the Remove from memory after ... is set to only 10 minutes below. We now all have lots of memory so I think this should probably be set to a longer time - say 60 minutes. It should certainly be longer than the AutoSave time. Users should try to remember to save their file every "less than 60 minutes" so that image files never get removed from memory before being saved once. I wonder if this timer is set to zero at each Save? or if it contunues running from when the document was first opened?

4 Set AutoSave to ON and Always Create a Backup Copy to ON (Tools > Options > LoadSave General). (But don't forget that highly_personal-bak will still be in the Backup folder long after you have deleted highly_personal.odt.)

5 Check if you are running any "disk clean" utilities to be sure they are not deleting files from ...\AppData\Local\Temp. Windows itself does not delete files from the ...\AppData\Local\Temp\ folder but many utilities do - for example, CCleaner does, but it only deletes files over 24 hours old.

6 Never leave a document "open" even if you have saved it. Always go File > Close..., or shut down Writer. THis is "just in case" because if you just go File > Save ..., the .odt file is saved (which should fully protect it??) but the temporary files remain in the ...\Temp folder (which shouldn't be a problem??).

Edit: It may also be sensible to use a different folder for temporary files rather than the default ...\AppData\Local\Temp which utilities may clear out. Tools > Options > OpenOffice > Paths > Temporary files ... Edit it to somewhere else - for example, create a folder in the Profile such as C:\Users\John\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice\4\user\New temp. No utilities will know about it so files will be safe from being deleted.

[WynSnow]

And it just happened again. Okay . . . what was I doing? I had very recently saved the document, as I was in the process of changing some formatting. I had also added one new picture either yesterday or today. [Looking at date of the image] I made the image "Yesterday at 10:42 pm' (however, look at note below about strange stuff happening with time stamps on files). I think I added that photo earlier today. Possibly within that 23:59 window Graphics Cache remove from memory after HH:MM. Of course, all the OTHER files, including the missing image, would be older than 23:59.

Unfortunately, I had NOT put a backup duplicate in a special folder in case this happened again, as I swore I would do henceforth. I had been having very good luck since my last post. I had even tried to duplicate the problem last weekend with doing a save-as, then not saving the new file again but editing it several times. I was not successful in duplicating the problem, and decided to keep everything in the same default places in case this happened again so I would then have new data to offer on the problem.

I do, however, have a new idea. I have a LOT of programs open, and quite a few files. Maybe there is a memory issue going on? Last weekend and yesterday, I had fewer programs and files open. I will now go look in the zip file and see what's in the pictures folder. Okay, that particular image is missing from the pictures file. The other 45 pictures are there. That is, there are 45 images in the pictures folder.

Looking at activity monitor (I will attach a tiff, but here is the main info):
Physical Memory: 5.00 GB
Memory Used: 3.81 GB
Cache: 869.2 MB
Swap Used: 160.5 MB

Detail on Memory Used:
App Memory: 1.56 GB
Wired Memory: 879.0 MB
Compressed: 1.39 GB

Something strange is happening with the file dates and times, too. I just now made duplicates of four files. They have dates of: 12/27 at 1:19 am, Yesterday at 11:12 pm, Today at 12:05 am, and Today at 7:37 pm. Also, the dates on all the images in the pictures folder are all Tomorrow at 12:24 am, which I am thinking must be Greenwich Mean Time. It is currently 7:46 pm where I am = Eastern Standard Time (New York City time zone).

I am going to try doing the "put image files in different place" idea from an earlier post from John_Ha.

Given that I do have the image in a different pictures folder, is it possible to somehow insert it back in without going through the whole rigmarole of Insert > Picture > From File > etc?

[WynSnow]

Oh right, forgot to mention / clarify one detail. I am not aware of having any disk-cleaning utility programs. I certainly have not added any. However, I did "inherit" this machine from a previous owner who *might* have done something like that. I'm not even sure what to look for, or where to look for it. (And this is a Mac, not a PC.)

Thanks again and in advance for your assistance, John!!

[John_Ha]

Wyn

I am at a loss. Let me answer several points. Preferences > LoadSave > General and tick Always create a backup copy and Save AutoRecovery every ... say 5 minutes.

It isn't a memory problem - you have 5GB installed and are only using 3.8 GB. Windows has a paging file so you can happily use 2x the installed memory = 10 GB without problems. You have lots to spare. Having many programs open should not cause it either.

If the pictures are gone from the document, you have no option but to re-insert them. Is the .odt file much smaller, implying the pictures are gone? Or unzip it and check inside the Pictures folder.

I recommend that you change the location of your temporary folder. Create an empty folder somewhere which will be used only by Writer. Preferences > OpenOffice > Paths > highlight Temp and press Edit. Navigate to the new folder.

You have set "Keep in memory" to 23h 59m. Can I suggest setting it somewhat lower - say 60m.

The file times could be related to the time at which Writer wrote them to ...\Temp.

Never leave the file open when you let the PC sleep or hibernate - always save it first.

Edit: ...and either close the document with File > Close, or shut down Writer completely, as suggested by acknak below.

[acknak]

If you're re-inserting images, you might consider switching to linked images. I don't think the problem affects linked images. The links are a bit more trouble to manage, but with a bit of planning it's not difficult.

Never leave the file open when you let the PC sleep or hibernate - always save it first.

Save and close the file first.

[John_Ha]

acknak

Good catch! When you save the file, but leave it "on screen", the temporary files remain in the ...\Temp folder. They only get removed when the file is closed with File > Close, or when Writer itself is closed.

A quick test shows that when you open multiple .odt documents, each document's temporary files gets placed in the same ...\Temp folder. I wonder if it is possible for Writer sometimes to lose track of which graphics (or indeed text) file belongs to which document, and deletes the wrong temporary files?

[WynSnow]

Interesting comments. I have been leaving files open that I plan to work on the next day. Saving, yes. Closing, no. And every time the images disappeared, I did have multiple files open -- of these, several had images in them. At least two, sometimes three or four. Going forward, however, I will save-and-close my ongoing project files at night.

As for method of closing file, I am a shortcut junkie -- I use the Mac's command-W to close files (and command-S to save them first).

I will definitely shorten the HH:MM time down to 60 minutes. And I have now set up a different /temp location. So if this happens again, we can rule that out as a contributing factor.

About shutting down AOO, I'd rather not. I use a spreadsheet to track certain aspects of my time. And I don't shut my computer off at night for a couple of reasons. The main one being that I always get up 3-4 times in the middle of the night and usually need to take another dose of Ibuprofen at one of those times. I generally play some Solitaire at that time as well. So turning my computer back on to play 15 minutes of Solitaire just does not appeal to me.

I'm reluctant to link image files. I have a habit of changing my mind about which folder a file should be "in", especially if a project becomes more complex and therefore needs a more sophisticated folder structure.

Anyway, the rest of today went well, and I worked with images on this project a LOT. And I'm glad to know that memory isn't the issue.

[WynSnow]

Progress report: No images have disappeared since previous post.

Also, the "AOO-does-not-know-about-this" folder and files John sent me are still in both the old /temp folder and the new /customAOOtemp folder.

We could try an experiment of redoing preferences back to the former /temp folder and see if images disappear again then. But it seems clear that nothing else in my system is getting rid of stuff in the /temp folder.

OTOH, I am now putting images into table cells. (These images sometimes "migrate" above the top of the table cell -- except they are still "really" inside the table cell, but if I do a print-to-PDF, it overlaps the top of the table cell. Fixing this migration thing is also annoying, but not as bad as my original problem. I have to move the image, then move it back.)

OTOOH, sometimes the "wrap" feature stopped working too. (This also happened occasionally at the time of my first post in this thread.) To get text wrapped again, I had to click a different wrap option. I alternated between regular "page wrap" and "optimal page wrap". It made no difference which I had chosen. Sometimes, the wrapping just stopped working and text went behind my image again.

BTW, I have now upgraded to El Capitan (10.11.1) with Great Regret. AOO crashes whenever I try to format cells in an ods file.

[WynSnow]

Woo hoo!! Images disappeared again!!!

So we can get back to experiments on the cause. Okay, when I upgraded to El Capitan, I did not change AOO's /temp folder to something unique. In fact, I did not change any preferences. So everything was as default user. (I recently had a different problem with Calc crashing when I upgraded to OS X 10.11.1. While in the midst of solving that problem, I had renamed my user folder and started up AOO again with a new, fresh, default user. Calc crashing issue was solved by upgrading to 10.11.3.)

What I did today before the images disappeared: I had a file (Town.odt) that I did a SAVE AS Hospital.odt. I took out all but two of the entries in Hospital. I added some new material below these two entries. I was doing some research on Wikipedia, came back to Hospital to type new stuff in it and saw the images had become "corrupted" looking.

I will look at the file save time to see when that file was last saved . . . okay Hospital was saved at 9:34 pm. File save time on the Town file is 8:31 pm. And my current time is 9:43 pm. So the images disappearing must have happened very soon after that most recent file save. Also, at some point between doing the Save As Hospital and the images disappearing (I'm not sure when), I also reopened Town.odt. Probably earlier than later. In other words, closer in time to 8:31 than to 9:34.

I will now go look at the original Town file and see how the images look. They look okay. I have now saved THAT file. Now going over to the /temp folder and taking a look inside that. Okay, there are a gazillion files in there. (Well, about 120. I currently have 12 files open, have been working on them since about 7:30 pm.) Looking for one with timestamp of 9:34...

Found it! And THAT file (when expanded) does NOT have a Pictures folder!!!! (Wow, this seems like a Huge Clue.) I also looked at the two files just before that in /temp. One was the 8:31 timestamp and is the Town file. It is okay, has a Pictures folder with the images that I kept in the Original Town file, and does not have the two that I erased because they were in the Hospital file. The file "between" those two, with timestamp of 8:32, could not be opened with the Unarchiver. I have made duplicates of those three files in case someone wants to see them.

Okay, I will now close the unaffected files (and thereby clean out the /temp folder). Hmmm. An additional 16 files are still in there. All refuse to open with the Unarchiver. 13 of them have timestamps of 9:44. The other 3 are timestamped 10:06. I have saved a copy of all of those in case it proves important. I am guessing they were autosaves??? The Preferences has Autosaves set to every 15 minutes. Except there was only one file with a timestamp between 8:31 and 9:34. So how could that one have been an AutoSave??? (That's not a Serious 'Question; I am just expressing confusion out loud.)

AOO preferences: remove after was set at 00:10 (10 minutes). Number of objects 100. Temp was set to /4/user/temp and I have now changed that to /4/user/mytemp

Looking forward to what folks want to do next.

I *could* try the same process with Save As -- which I had done the very first time this problem occurred -- now with the new /mytemp folder instead of the default /temp -- and see if the images stay or disappear. And/or, I could go back to the default /temp and see if I can reproduce this images disappearing.

A thought. I might have had more than 100 images in the open files. Counting . . . yup: I had 101 images in those open files.

[WynSnow]

Well drat pooey!! Images disappeared again today, and this time I did NOT have a lot of files open with 100+ images in them. So that is apparently NOT the cause of this problem.

However, I DID do a "Save As". Which suggests that this process, together with files being put into the default /temp user profile folder, are a significant part of the cause.

Here's what I did:

1. Opened Source file. Had it open for a while examining some info in there.
2. Decided I wanted to split this information in two. Did "Save as" TheNew file. (Created at 8:24 pm)
3. Took out the information I planned to store in Source file, Took out all images. Saved the file (at 8:28 pm)
4. Reopened Source file. Started making changes to the text. Saved Source file at 8:30 pm.
5. While making more changes to the text in Source, realized that all but one of the images had gone bye-bye.

I have now looked the /temp folder's files for Source and TheNew. Source has a pictures folder, it contains the one image that did not disappear. New does not have a Pictures folder (not surprising since I removed all the images from that folder). The /temp folder also had another file in it with a timestamp of 8:45 (which is after I started writing this), which I could not open with the Unarchiver.

I have saved copies of the /temp folder's Source, TheNew, and could-not-open-it file of 8:45, in case anyone wants to look at them. I will now make sure that I have changed my user /temp folder, shut down all my AOO files, and reopen it.

Sigh.

[John_Ha]

Wyn.

Sorry for the delay ...

The key question for me is "What happened to the dummy files in the ...\temp folder?" Were they deleted too? Or did you not put them back when you upgraded the OS? If not, could you please put them back so we can check if "they too get deleted when images disappear".

I have another theory but you might have blown (part of) it out of the water. When images are lost, users often say they have a lot of images in the document, and I note that you had upwards of 100 image files in the ...\Temp folder. Now, we know that deleting one of these temporary files causes that image to be lost and replaced by the error message. So my thought was - Does AOO delete these files by their actual name? or by *.tmp? Writer allocates a random filename to these temporary files - does Writer start to re-use these random names after 100 or so images, so the image gets lost or overwritten?

So, at the moment we still have you losing images. I know that is bad for you , but that is VERY GOOD for us as it helps us debug it!!

Could I therefore please ask you to:

1 Tell me which folder you are now using for your ...\Temp. Is it the default folder used by all applications? Or did you create a new folder that only Writer knows about?

2 Place the temporary files I sent you in whatever ...\Temp folder you are now using.

We now wait until you lose images again (sorry!) and when you do, we check to see it those files were also deleted.

[WynSnow]

In both recent instances when the images disappeared, I was using the default /4/user/temp folder. And alas, no, I had not put a copy of the files you sent me into that /temp folder. After the first recent time that the images disappeared, I *thought* I changed to a different customized /myTemp folder, but even though I had changed that location in my Preferences, I had not closed AOO so it was still putting stuff in the default /temp.

Now, I am using the new custom named /myTemp folder. (And yes, AOO is storing stuff in there, not in /temp, so I know this change has "propagated" as they say in the domain registry world.) A copy of the files you sent me are in both the default /temp folder and in my custom /myTemp folder.

I will post any news when it happens.

[John_Ha]

Wyn

Some more thoughts ...

Q1 When do you notice that you have lost images?

Is it when you open the file and you see they are gone? Or is it while you are editing the file, and you scroll up or down, and you see they are gone?

If the first, we don't know when the images got lost. When you saved the file, so the file is saved without the images? Or the file was saved OK, but the images got lost when when you opened the file? Doing further tests on ...\Temp when you open the file won't help. [Note - this sentence has been changed from my email to you]

But if the second, ie you lose images while editing the file, that is very interesting, and warrants testing ...\Temp. It would be extremely useful if you could keep a "watching eye" on the ...\Temp folder to see how many files are there. Then, immediately after losing images, and before doing anything else, check to see what the contents of ...\Temp are.

Q2 Can you see if the temporary image files have gone from ...\Temp\abcde.tmp\ - ie the temporary image files have been deleted, so the images in the document have disappeared.

Another thought. You have multiple files open, which means there are multiple abcdef.tmp folders in ...\Temp, one for each open document.

Q3 Do you lose images from only one file? Or from more than one file?

If you lose them from more than one file, it is probable that some external program is clearing out the ...\Temp folder. But if you lose them from only one file, it is likely that Writer is deleting them, because only Writer would delete them from just that single folder.

Ho-hum!

Edit: This is a bug in AOO. See [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images for a discussion on lost images.