Not Pictured

Q: I sometimes receive emails that contain photos but the photos do not display. All I get is two lines with a tiny square in the corner. Other times the photos come through with no difficulty. Once I received an email and when I opened it the photos displayed but then they disappeared and I got the two lines and the little square.

I suspect that some security function is responsible but I tried turning off Norton Internet Security, the Windows firewall, and Trend Micro's Anti-Spyware with no luck.
B. McComb
A: I think that most people have experienced what you are experiencing at one time or another, but contrary to your suspicions the problem is likely not with your computer’s security. It helps to keep in mind that pictures can take up a lot of your computer’s memory, depending on what else is running, it’s size, how it’s formatted, the number of pictures, and the amount of memory that you have installed on your computer. This may explain why pictures in emails take a while to load, and why some that flicker or disappear when a page is refreshed.
With that said, there are three frequent sources of the box with red lines, usually an X, and no picture. The picture can be merely lost in translation. Rich text format is primarily used by MS Outlook and not other email programs so if an email was sent in rich text format to someone using an email program that doesn’t support rich text, then the image would not be seen. An image can be lost also if an html formatted email is sent and the recipient doesn’t have their email program set to receive html formatted emails. The last issue is only a matter of enabling this function in the options section of your email program.
The next suspect to check out is the settings for your web browser. If you have a web based email account like yahoo or hotmail then the settings on your web browser will affect what is displayed in your emails. If the option to display images is not selected then there will be no pictures for you. I doubt that this is the case for you or you would not be able to see any pictures at all online, and we would be having a different conversation.
Another potential source for your problem is that in html formatted emails, the image is not actually embedded in the email. There is a script in the emails code that tells it where to locate the picture. For instance, the image could be stored on Flikr.com or photobucket.com and the location of the image on those sites servers is what is displayed in an email. So if the location where the image is stored has changed or if it is powered off, then you will see the box and lines. You really can’t do too much in this situation.