A plea for help. I'm getting reports of problems with IE and images, but I can't fathom the problem. (Updated again 15 July 2003: comments in JPEG files may be the culprit.)
Over the past couple of weeks, I've had several reports from readers having trouble viewing images from this site in IE. I even managed to replicate the problem myself on Deb's laptop, though I was none the wiser for the effort.
The symptom as described is that you go to a page that contains one or more images and the text loads fine in IE but the images never come up. The browser status area reports that it's waiting for some number of images and the browser keeps on chugging, but nothing is ever displayed.
Server logs suggest that 43 or so percent of you are coming in with one version of Internet Explorer or another. Are only a miniscule percentage of readers experiencing the problem, or reporting it?
I'm stumped. Intuition and a few moments casual testing suggest that I could work around it by making all the image links more explicit (removing all content negotiation from the equation) but I really don't want to. And I can't see why it should be necessary.
Clues solicited.
It's the metadata Update: 24 July 2003: After another week, I'm pretty sure it's the metadata (comments in JPEG files, actually). Below are two images: they are identical except that one has embedded metadata and the other doesn't. Many (most? all?) IE users, can only see the one without metadata.
Wet Lily without Metadata
A daylily in the rain
Wet Lily with Metadata
A daylily in the rain
Update: 15 Jul 2003: I've removed image metadata from the thumbnail and scaled images. This should make both of the images above and most other images accessible. It's possible that “full size” images (the ones you get on if you click on an image on a page) will still cause problems. While I'm sympathetic, I'm very fond of my metadata and I'm not moved to rip it all out just to work around a broken browser.
Comments:
Have you tried using GIFs instead of PNGs ? IE/Win only partially (no transparency) supports PNG since v5.5 I think. You may alsowant to lower the compression ratio on your images, because the artifacts are quite visible :) Cheers.
Yeah, i'm seeing the issue as well (IE6, Win2k). I don't have any clues for you, but I thought I'd add my data point.
There are a few PNGs, but I've avoided transparency on them for just the reasons you note. The problematic images are almost all JPGs.
Just a guess - but it could be that you used Photoshop 7.0 for Mac and did not use "Save for Web". It stores extra metadata for printing controls and such in the JPEG headers. It happens to crash IE for Windows JPEG system until closing.
I ran into this problem with my site. I used some command line wizardry to strip it all out: http://toadstool.se/blog/archives/000031.php
IE6/Win2k shows Metadata: NO but does not show Metadata: Yes.
I thought the meta data in jpg was too good to be true. :-)
I can't see the images in IE. I'm using IE 5.5 here at work and IE 6 on my laptop... neither one works.
hi norman,
i can see both images (IE5.0). but the properties of both images show as size in bytes of -1 and no type of image. so maybe there is something wrong with the headers. and please don't use PNG on webpages, IE's native PNG support, if available, is really bad and if you have quicktime installed it always grabs the rights to show PNG's, loads the very slow QT-plugin and crashes with a chance of 500D
best regards, andi
with IE6/XP, the image with no Metadata shows, the "YES" image does not.
The plausible explanation seems to be the photoshop-supplied metadata.
Hi Norm,
FWIW, I can see both images just fine in IE 6.0.2800 (with all patches applied) on both Windows XP and Windows 2000.
Just to verify that I had the right file, I can see the RDF when I save the file and look at it in a binary editor.
BTW, I love that photo!
Cheers, Marty.
Now I can see all images (both marked as "metadata: no" and "metadata: yes") in my IE6.0 (W2K). The same for larger version of these images. The thing to note is that IE cannot detect their type and intrinsic size (appropriate properties in IE are set to "Not available").
In addition to my previous post: when I said "all images" I meant "all images on this page" (nice wet lily). But this one is still a mistery for my IE: http://norman.walsh.name/2003/07/08/images/beebalm2 The same for the rest of images from that set (tumbnail images work fine).
IE 6.0.2800 running XP (has all the current updates), I can see both images no problem
Hi Norm,
I'm using IE 6.0.2800 at home and can see all the pictures. Nice site BTW... looks none too bad here even if you reckon Mozilla would do a better job.
One oddity is that if I "right-click->Open Link in New Window" on a picture I get the middle size image with metadata and prev/next buttons. Simply clicking gets me the full size image. Also clicking the prev/next buttons also steps to a full size image rather than a middle size image plus metadata.
Curious...
Stuart