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! 

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from using the community bugs">

[sydnney2672703868fo]

thank you!

[sydnney2672703868fo]

Upon further investigation, it seems that the links are being broken. If I go into the links library, I can manually relink the files and the images will reappear, but I don't understand why this is happening and so frequently. I've been using the same workflow forever and have never had this issue before. 

[Mike_Gondek]

The links should not break if the file path to the files do not change,. You should also show a red chain icon showing the link is broken.

 

You are showing no icon which means the file is embedded. Please flip the triangle underneath to confirm what happened to the file.

 

[Mike_Gondek]

If you are logged into an incorrect account, or maybe you have a slow connection you will have more problems with saving to the cloud. Why not create those gradients in Illustrator instead? If you ned more help please flip the triangle to show the information on the image file in question, so we can better help you.

[sydnney2672703868fo]

None of them have a broken link icon next to it. I did try to embed some of the images to see if that helped - these are the ones that are turning black. Any that are simply linked disappear. Most of the gradients are made in After Effects, Illustrator can't always achieve the look I'm going for. I did make the green and orange gradient in Illustrator though, and even that is disappearing. But it's not just the gradient backgrounds, but also the images and graphics I've made. The longer I work in a project, the more things disappear until it's just text left. 

This is what my links library looks like. Even images that are gone still show the link connected icon next to it and shows the correct location in my folders below. 

[Ton Frederiks]

Try to move them on your internal harddisk. They also have a strange creation date, 6 february 2040.