Keynote presentations are missing images

This morning I opened a presentation I had worked on over the weekend, simply to look for errors before using it today. Suddenly multiple images were missing. Disaster! Luckily I had an old copy that I was able to access but will now have to do some quick, last minute editing.

I simply don't understand Apple's choices in the past couple of years in how they're developing their software. Even something simple like "save as" being removed has made my life more complicated. What ever happened to "It just works"?

Hoping that someone at Apple is using this to identify and prioritize the issue, here's to asking that this be fixed soon.

This issue is not even addressed in this thread, 8 months later? *** Apple?

This seems to be getting no better. I've been getting the X's and ?'s for a while now and it seems associated with ANY kind of network share, replication, updating and the like. Even opening a local copy of a replicated file (I use InSync for G-drive) causes images to evaporate and when I try to replace them directly I get a stupid error saying that the image I'm trying to insert is not of a supported type (it's a PNG!). Deleting the broken placeholder, quitting the app and reopening allows me to re-inter the images.

Do I REALLY have to keep a copy of everything local on my machine?? Or is iCloud magically going to fix this pile of dren. Any response from Apples CS team would be good around now.

I recently had this missing images problem when opening up a Presentation from Keynote 09 (desktop) into the latest version (laptop). Fortunately I could still use my older version of Keynote on the other computer. But I found that Moving the presentation (File > Move To ) and creating a new folder for it, forces it to recopy all the images again. Everything was back to normal when opening it on the new version of Keynote. Except for the background colour of the slide being wrong...

Its a work around! Hopefully this will help somehow. 🙂

I just ran into this and am floored. Something like this is one of the reasons I switched from PowerPoint to Keynote several years back.

I just discovered that my lectures that I used last spring are now missing images.

I looked inside the package of one of my keynote files and the missing images are just not there. So there is no getting them back with the workaround of copying or moving the *.key package/file (which I tried anyway). This is a serious problem for anyone who uses Keynote professionally.

So here is a new and bizarre twist.

I can revert to the next to last version of my keynote, which still has the images that are missing in my current version. I can copy a missing image from that reverted version into a new keynote with no problem.

But when I try to paste it into a copy of my keynote with the missing images, it pastes as an empty box with an X and ? in it. I assume that the image index is corrupted. But how can this be fixed?

This is on top of the nasty bug that makes it very difficult to set the build order, linking text bullets and images. No matter how you drag, the images associate randomly with the bullets. The only workaround is to make sure that the first bullet is also animated (bullet animations start from first, not second, bullet). Then you can arrange and reset animation to start with 2nd bullet. Argh!

Bad bugs! Can't believe they are not fixed, especially since there was an update recently.

I have the same issue with Keynote 6.2.2 and a presentation stored in the cloud. Any fix for it?

Yes, FOR MISSING IMAGES AND FILES GETTING SCRAMBLED

I spent an hour and a half with a APPLE tech for process and elimination to this issue. First...DropBox, Gmail, and Comcast are one of the few that are scrambling the file when transferring it to a cloud, another server, or through email, etc. There are two things you can to to prevent this. Right click > the actual KeyNote file and COMPRESS it before transferring to keep it from getting scrambled. You can also take the scrambled files once they were transferred and magically turn it back into the original KeyNote file...Select All the files, then deselect just the index file, Right Click > and choose New Folder with Selection (which are the selected folders/files aside of the index you deselected), then give that folder and extension .key. It will then automatically revert to the keynote file back to the way it was. Hope this helps. It worked for me either way.

Thanks for the info. But my file was stored on iCloud. 😟

So here is a new and bizarre twist.

I can revert to the next to last version of my keynote, which still has the images that are missing in my current version. I can copy a missing image from that reverted version into a new keynote with no problem.

But when I try to paste it into a copy of my keynote with the missing images, it pastes as an empty box with an X and ? in it. I assume that the image index is corrupted. But how can this be fixed?

Thanks for the suggested fix. My problem keynote is indeed on dropbox. But I've had no problems previously, and I've used keynote and dropbox for several years for lectures and presentations. I hope this is not some kind of new incompatibility between the two.

The 'magic' recovery won't work for at least some of my files unfortunately. I've opened up the package and the missing graphics are simply gone. They are not in the folder with the other images. So copying the remaining files will not help. What I DID do, however, was look at prior versions from within keynote (not exactly sure how these are being saved). A penultimate version had the missing graphics. So I copied them from that version. A pain obviously--especially when I am now worried about having to check for this in all my many presentations and lectures. But at least I recovered it.

This works on all my files. But yes I can see that maybe it isn't working for you on all because i don't know where the native file has been transferred and how many times. That will make a difference. But I had the same issue with x'd out boxes where images were supposed to me. But this solution resolved mine.

This problem has existed since 2008 or before (search x disease), I can't remember seeing a response from apple, it is deplorable! This is such a significant problem. Please Apple, address this problem or at least respond.