All images in my Xway document have been replaced by placeholders with a question mark in them

Hello,

I downloaded a trial version of Xway 1.0 a couple of days ago. My 2022 MacBook Air is running macOS 15.1 (24B83).

In order to familiarise myself with Xway 1.0, I worked through and completed the first tutorial (“Xway Tutorial”), successfully creating Ambient and Ambient Light websites.

This morning I worked through and completed the first part of the second tutorial (“Xway Menu Tutorial”), i.e., as far as the end of page 12 in the pdf instruction document.

As instructed on Page 13 of the pdf instruction document for the Xway Menu Tutorial, I re-opened the Ambient website that I’d created, only to discover that all images in it had been replaced by grey placeholders with a question mark in them. I shut down my laptop, reopened it and re-loaded the program and then the document, but it has made no difference.

The Ambient Light website that I created when working through the first tutorial is still working perfectly - i.e, all the images are where they should be.

I’d be very grateful if you could let me know what’s likely to have caused this problem, and how I can fix it - many thanks in advance!

Hi Sua,

I don’t know what caused that problem. Xway copies resources into the document package, so you should hardly ever see a placeholder image (unless you are importing a Freeway document).

You can reattach images by going to the Resources view. This will tell you whether the images are missing, or whether they are inaccessible.

Did you do anything to the Ambient document after you saved it?

Hi Jeremy,

Many thanks for your response.

I had simply downloaded the “Xway Tutorial Documents” folder from the Softpress website, opened Ambient and Ambient Light, and saved them as Ambient 1 and Ambient Light 1 as instructed. They both worked for a little while, until they didn’t - all images being replaced by grey placeholders with a question mark in them.

I did in fact figure out how to fix the problem yesterday evening after I’d already sent my email to you. When I selected the hero-image.jpg on the home pages of the original Ambient and the Ambient 1 copy I’d made, the Status in both instances showed as “Missing” and the Path (greyed out) was /Users/jeremy/Desktop/Xway 1_0/Tutorials/Xway Tutorial/Media/hero-image.jpg. I pressed the “Locate” button, selected the hero-image.jpg in the Media folder and hey-presto it appeared where it should. I repeated the same procedure for all the other missing images and was therefore able to reconstruct the sites so they looked the way they should.

I hope this is useful!

If you need to locate images, you can save time by not selecting the missing (or inaccessible) image. Xway enables the file dialog’s Locate button when you have navigated to the folder that contains the missing/inaccessible image. If you click on Locate (or press Return) at that point, without selecting the image, you are giving Xway permission to access that image and any other images that are in the same folder. If you select a specific image, you are giving Xway permission to access only that image, and you will have to repeat this procedure for every missing image that is within that folder.

Images can become “missing” if you move the original files after they have been imported into a document, but it’s very unusual that your document seems to have lost track of the original images along with its internal copies of these images.

Many thanks for the advice re the use of the Locate button - much appreciated.