missing images in media library

Thanks for your report. I know that a problem like this is stressful and I regret any role that MLA might be playing.

You wrote “the timing is suspicious“. Did you update MLA around that time? Recent MLA updates have been rather modest and since you wrote “It doesn’t matter whether or not MLA is active or not” it seems less likely to be causing trouble.

The poor performance of the Media/Assistant admin submenu and the messages you list in you post may be caused by some MLA options you can easily do without. You should navigate to the Settings/Media Library Assistant General tab and check two settings:

• Make sure all four “Where-used Reporting” options are set to disabled. These features are great when you need them but can take a lot of resources even if you don’t use them.
• In the “Media/Assistant Screen Options” section, set the “Entries per page” option to something modest, e.g., 20 or less. Large numbers can use up a lot of time and memory.

Thank you as well for your “Confession”. Site restoration can be complex and error prone; plugins like Media Cleaner can get confused by database errors and compound the damage.

I did have a look at your site (very nice!), but I didn’t see the corrupted posts you described. Perhaps you can point me to a specific post I could investigate further. Other than the slow Media/Assistant issue I am not sure what else I can suggest at this point. Thanks for your understanding and your interest in MLA.

It has been a month since my last post in this topic. I hope you have found a solution for your missing image files.

I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have additional information I can use to give you more specific help.

David,
Thanks for your reply. I still haven’t figured out what is going on, but it seems to be only a back-end problem, so I’ve been taking my time to try to figure it out and report back. No luck, so far. I had someone look at it and they couldn’t figure it out either — but it has to be an issue with how media library and MLA are contacting and/or reading the database. Posts find all the images without issues, library and MLA spin a lot before finding some of them.

A perhaps odd question:
With MLA running my dashboard menu reads as follows:
Media
? Assistant
? Add New
? Categories

Is that how it should read? I swear that (before this problem started and I uninstalled and reinstalled MLA a couple times) the list included “Media Library” as the first option under “Media” Is that possible? And, if so, should it be there now?

(Still trying to isolate where the problem is!!)

BTW, I love MLA. Even when it’s not working completely right.

Thanks.

Thanks for your update and for the positive feedback. I regret that you’re still investigating the missing images problem.

You wrote “Posts find all the images without issues“. Are you referring to images inserted in the body of the post? Inserted images hard-code the URL and do not rely on the database to find the image. The admin screens like “Library” and “Assistant” depend on database records associated with the image file; that may be a clue. Someone who knows the WordPress database structures and can use a tool such as phpMyAdmin might be able to figure out what’s missing.

Regarding your “dashboard menu”, you can have a look at some MLA option settings that may affect the menu items.

• Navigate to the Settings/Media Library Assistant General tab.
• Scroll down to the “Media/Assistant Screen Options” section.
• Make sure the box to the left of “Display Media/Library” is checked.
• Optionally, check the box to the left of “Display Media/Assistant list/grid view switcher”.
• Optionally, change the “Submenu Order” if you want to change where the “Assistant” submenu entry appears in the Media menu.

I hope you will find that the “Display Media/Library” is not checked, explaining why the Library submenu entry is missing. If that doesn’t correct the problem, let me know.

You might also look at the “Taxonomy Support” section and see if you have intended to remove support for “Att. Categories” and “Att. Tags”. They should show up in the submenu list by default.

Yes, mystery solved. It wasn’t set to show the media library.

And thank you for explaining how the library gets images vs posts. I’ve been asking that question, apparently not clearly enough, for a couple of months now to try to understand why posts are fine and the media library isn’t. I knew there was a database problem, I just didn’t understand why it only made a difference in the library!

I’ve been trying to get a local recommendation for someone to look at the database — I guess it’s time to really focus on that.

Thanks for the help. You can consider this closed now.

David,
Yes, I’m still dealing with this mess.

New question:

If I use Enable Media Replace in MLA, the images will appear in both MLA AND in the Media Library itself. (Thus, apparently, working around the broken image issue. I don’t think it’s actually fixed.)

HOWEVER, if I do the same thing through the Media Library (which is much, much faster), MLA still thinks the image is missing/broken even though it now appears normal in Library.

Any idea why it would do this and how to get MLA to recognize the replacement image from Media Library?

Thanks for the update. I regret seeing that you are still dealing with this issue.

You wrote “If I use Enable Media Replace in MLA…” Enable Media Replace is a separate plugin; it is not part of MLA. I would guess that whatever it does includes repairing the “missing file” damage. This suggests that the problem is caused by Media Library items whose “attached file” no longer exists.

You wrote “HOWEVER, if I do the same thing through the Media Library…” I am not sure what you mean by “the same thing”, because the WordPress Media Library does not have a feature that does what Enable Media Replace does. Can you tell me what steps you follow in the Media Library to “do the same thing”?

IF Enable Media Replace is activated, from MLA I can either click on an image (or missing image in this case) or the “edit” link underneath to get to the image editing screen. With Enable Media Replace, I get a Media Replace box at the bottom that says “upload a new file” Clicking on that takes me into the media replace screen. If I replace the image there, it will then show up in both MLA and the regular library.

What’s weird (and unfortunate) is that it doesn’t work in reverse — replacing it in the library doesn’t replace it in MLA. And MLA is a really slow way to do it. ??

For troubleshooting, trying to figure out why it works in both from MLA and not in library. (Trying to figure out what is going on to find a way to have someone go into the database and be able to find and fix these in bulk.) But I thought you might find it interesting.

Thanks for your update and for your patience while I was traveling. Thanks as well for your details on the steps you follow to “use Enable Media Replace in MLA…“.

You wrote “replacing it in the library doesn’t replace it in MLA“. Can you tell me the steps you follow to “replace it in the library”? In particular, are you using the Media/Library “grid” view, or the “list” view? Do you still get to the full-screen Edit Media screen with these steps?

Thanks for your persistence.