Images disappearing or turning black

[sydnney2672703868fo]

Illustrator has been increasingly glitchy for a few months now. When working on files, images will randomly turn black or disappear - the image is still clearly there as it highlights blue when I hover my cursor over it, but the photo or graphic will not show up. It usually comes back briefly if I save, close, quit Ai, and reopen, but shortly it will happen again. I am using MacOS Sonoma 14.1.2 with the most updated 2024 version of Illustrator. All my images are .jpg or .png in RGB stored on an external hard drive. I store the images in their proper folders before importing them into the Ai file, so they aren't missing or unlocated. I have noticed it doesn't happen as frequently when I save the project file on Adobe Cloud and work from there, but that doesn't solve my problem completely - still have disappearing images. 

Please help! My workflow is so interrupted by having to close and quit the program every 10 minutes! 

[Abhishek Rao]

Hi @joannax2560345,

Thanks for sharing the details about the disappearing images. I completely understand how frustrating this must be, especially when you’re working on a tight deadline. To help us investigate further with the team, could you please confirm the version of Illustrator and macOS you're using? It would also be helpful to know if this happens with all files or only certain ones.

Could you also check if this issue still occurs on the latest version of Illustrator, v29.8.1? I'm coordinating with the team to look into this, and knowing whether it persists on the newest version will help us pinpoint the cause.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

[marcel81]

i have Sequoia 15.6.1 with Illustrator 29.8.1. I made a quick video of the issue.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

What happens if you place rather than drag from Photoshop? Try both link and embed options.

What happens if you turn off GPU performance?

[marcel81]

gpu is turned off (after reading that this can solve the issue).

place the file works fine, this is the way i work normally.

but sometimes dragging from ps is easier, for example for quick vectorization etc.

i think this is a clipboard/cache issue.

[Ton Frederiks]

I could replicate this problem by dragging a layer with transparency, a screendump and an image from a webbrowser. It started working after Resetting the Preferences. It came back, but resetting solved it again.

It is always good to use the Place command (and to Export your settings while they are still reliable, so you can use Edit > My Settings > Import  Settings when things go wrong)

See also: https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/601447-illustrator-desktop-bugs/suggestions/49703918-images...

[Alejandro242260814jhq]

I am having the same issue. I am using the latest version of Illutrator 29.8.2 and the annoying issue is still happening. 

[Abhishek Rao]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for sharing your inputs and for your patience while we looked into this. The team is aware of this issue and has requested the exact reproducible steps along with an affected sample file for testing. Please share these so we can investigate it further. Using the Place command continues to work as a temporary workaround.

Once we have the required details, we'll share updates as soon as there's progress.

Thanks again for your cooperation and for sharing recordings and observations

Abhishek