Image attachments not automatically shown anymore, ideas?

[mdavenport]

I have been a user of gmail for sometime now and until recently when viewing an email with JPG attachments the images were automatically shown in the email.

Now I have to click View to see the image. This then opens in another window.

Is there a way to turn on the automatic viewing of images again?

Thanks
Mark

[xmailer]

Since I still see thumbnails for image attachments in my own Gmail account, it doesn't appear that Gmail has discontinued that feature. However, it's a "known issue" that the thumbnails feature periodically just stops working for some accounts, an issue which I've experienced repeatedly in more than one Gmail account myself.

If this is your issue, you're seeing just a "place holder" icon, rather than an actual thumbnail in the place where the thumbnails usually appear, is that correct? Assuming this is the case, unfortunately Gmail support hasn't offered any "fix" or suggestions for solving the problem, but the last time I researched it their only comment was that they were "working on it." Since it was quite awhile ago that I first experienced it, it looks like it's taking them a LONG time to fix it.

Unfortunately I'm not able to make any suggestions for fixing it either, except to say that at least one time when it happened to me, I went as far as to open a new Gmail account and set the "buggy" account to autoforward all messages to the new account, accessing my messages from the new account instead, just to get the thumbnail feature back again.

Near as I can recall, every time this bug has surfaced in any of my Gmail accounts, the thumbnails eventually started working again. But unfortunately, there seems to be no way of knowing how long the problem will persist in any given case, and I've never come up with any better way to address it than as I've said, by opening a new account. Wish I could offer more help, but that's all I know about it.

[xmailer]

To add just a little more to what I said above, even in my accounts in which thumbnails are usually working, when opening a message with numerous image attachments, I still sometimes find that only some of them appear as thumbnails, the remainder showing only the "place holder" images. This is more likely to occur the more images are attached to the message, and is almost "guaranteed" to happen, in my experience, on those relatively rare occasions when I've received a message with 15 or 20 or more images attached.

Generally, the "first" images, that is, those nearest to the top, will appear as thumbnails "sequentially", until at some point one image will appear only as a place holder, with all those "following" it, or beneath it, likewise only showing place holders. In such cases, I can generally get more of the thumbnails to show by "closing" the message (that is, going back to the message list) and reopening it one or more times, which generally leads to more of the thumbnails appearing on each subsequent opening of the message, until they (finally) all appear as thumbnails.

Quite a hassle, especially if it takes numerous "reopenings" of the same message to see them all, but that's the only "fix" I've been able to find, and I can't promise it'll work if you're not able to see any of the thumbnails.

[mdavenport]

Yes I am just seeing a place holder icon rather than a thumbnail. It does seem to happy perodically.

Could this be a browser problem?

Mark

[xmailer]

Originally Posted by mdavenport

Could this be a browser problem?

Actually, that did cross my mind and I thought of suggesting you try clearing your browser's cache (if you haven't yet). But although I don't suppose it would "cost" much to try that, on second thought I decided that that didn't seem likely, since that wouldn't explain why the new account, accessed with the same browser, worked fine, even while the old one was still experiencing the problem when I went back and checked it. At least I can't think of any reason why two different accounts at the same service, using the same interface and browser, would "act" differently, unless it was "account-specific".

Not that the best I can recall when I last looked into it did Google themselves seem to suggest anything about it being browser-specific (although it's been awhile, so I can't say for certain that they didn't, either), but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try a different browser, which could presumably help verify with more certainty whether it's browser related. Since I'm not currently experiencing the problem, I don't know how I could test it myself at the moment. But for what it's worth, I'll just say that although I've mainly been using Firefox 1.5 & 2.0 since around the end of last year, I was still using Internet Explorer 6 exclusively the first time I had the problem, and possibly the last time as well. Which one do you generally use?

Edit: Also, have you tried an "alternate" interface? I can't even recall whether the "plain" non-AJAX HTML interface shows the thumbnails or not, since I've so seldom used that. But have you tried switching to/from that one or between the "older" and "newer" interfaces of so-called "standard" version? I don't think I ever tried that, since I'm not sure the "newer version" had even been released yet the last time I had the problem. That's not a complete "fix" even if it works, if your as "partial" regarding the interfaces as I am (I personally loathe the "newer" version, both for its relative slowness and its appearance), but it might be an interesting "experiment" anyway, to see whether it has any "effect" on the problem. Or have you tried that?

[xmailer]

Here is my own post first reporting this issue in this forum. I knew it was quite awhile ago, but I didn't recall it being quite as far back as September of 2006 -- almost two years ago. So obviously it's taking them quite awhile to fix it, although I can't say I have much confidence that they necessarily ever will.

And here may be the most recent word from Google about it:

Thumbnail images aren't displaying

The Gmail Team is aware of this problem and we're working to fix it. In the meantime, you can still view these image attachments by clicking View, Download or View all images. Thanks for your patience.

Which as far as I can recall is also unchanged in two years. Is it any wonder that Gmail is widely regarded as the world's longest-running Beta project?

Edit: Of course, you could try contacting their support as suggested by war17 in the thread I linked to above, to see if they might actually address your problem individually, if you're persistent enough, as I really didn't have the patience to bother with, instead merely opening a new account as I said above. But do you suppose that if everyone opened a new Gmail account every time they experienced a "bug" that it might help prompt Google to try a little harder to actually fix the problems?

Nah...