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wonderful_Echoc837
Participant
September 17, 2026
Question

Embedded images disappear from .ai file

  • September 17, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 8 views

Hello! I’m a professional who uses Illustrator to design jewelry concepts for work. This means that in any given file, I’ll be using a number of different images of jewelry parts that I drop in from my computer’s local files. I always embed the images into the Illustrator file so that I can send them back and forth between myself, my boss, and my coworkers easily without losing anything along the way. 

Sometimes, when I reopen my files, I will find that there are images missing from them. Often, over half of the images are missing. The images are embedded, NOT linked, so I don’t understand why they vanish. I will be able to see the bound boxes, but the image that should be within the box is gone. It gets in the way of my work almost every day and is extremely frustrating. We have tight deadlines and I cannot be constantly replacing images in my files every time I open them up to work on them. 

Is there any way to recover the images without having to manually replace them one by one every time? See screencap below of one page from my asset library file, which recently started giving me this problem and is ruining my week because of it. Note that some images are fine, while many are gone. 

All of the Adobe programs on my computer are up to date with the most recent update. Illustrator is version 30.8.1.

 

    3 replies

    wonderful_Echoc837Author
    Participant
    September 17, 2026

    Also, Adobe, can you stop with the genAI features? It’s all useless, and I’m sick of accidentally destroying the Earth’s atmosphere every time I want to crop an image.

    graphics_4075
    graphics_4075
    Inspiring
    September 17, 2026

    This bug has persisted through various versions for like 8 years now. I’ve had it happen and AFAIK no one has succesffully tracked down what is causing it. I recommend commenting and upvoting the existing UserVoice below. There is a comment from about a month ago confirming it is still happening.

     

    https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/601447-illustrator-desktop-bugs/suggestions/33341182-pasted-embedded-images-are-disappearing?page=1&per_page=20

     

    Do you send the images or the file back and forth between people? If its the file, do they also experience this when they open it? It might help to test that, especially if they are on a different system (I think you’re on Windows?).

     

    As for how to mass-recover the images, I am not sure with embedded ones but if they are stored in the same folder, Illustrator will finally relink all missing assets from a folder. It would sacrifice the “portability” of your file but possibly save time in recovering it. 

    Cheers
      wonderful_Echoc837Author
      Participant
      September 18, 2026

      Hey, thanks so much for the reply... glad to know I’m not suffering alone, I guess. I am using Windows, yes.

      I send the file itself back and forth, and the people who open it on their own computers report images to be missing. Sometimes I’ll finish working on something and send it off like usual (without reopening to check), only to hear from my boss that the file I sent has missing pictures, and I have to re-make the whole thing. Some of the people in my office use windows and others use Mac, but it doesn’t seem to affect whether the images are visible or not, from what I can tell.

      For my asset library file, it’s especially frustrating. I spent so long collecting a lot of images, saving them, cropping them correctly, coloring and recoloring, organizing them onto artboards and categorizing my layers only for the file to fail me when I actually need to use it. I just want to kick my computer across the room (I won’t).

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