Fix “this picture can’t be displayed” in PowerPoint

You open a PowerPoint deck you saved last week, and where your images used to be there’s a red X with “this picture can’t be displayed.” The slides look fine in the thumbnail pane, but the actual images are gone. This almost always comes down to one of three things: the image was linked instead of embedded, the file got corrupted during a save, or PowerPoint doesn’t recognize the format.

The embedded-vs-linked distinction is the one that catches most people. If the image was linked, the fix takes under a minute.

Re-embed the broken images

Check whether images are linked

Go to File >> Info and look for an Edit Links to Files option near the bottom-right of the Info panel.

• If it’s there, at least some images in your deck are linked rather than embedded — meaning PowerPoint stored a file path reference instead of the actual image data.
• Click it to see which files are broken.
• Any link with a warning icon points to a source file that moved, got renamed, or was deleted from its original location.

Linked images save disk space, but they break the moment you rename a folder, move the deck to another machine, or disconnect from the network drive where the source lives. For any deck you plan to share, email, or present on a different computer, embedded images are the only safe option.

Reinsert with the embed option

Delete the broken placeholder entirely — don’t try to replace it in-place, since that sometimes carries over the corrupted reference. Go to Insert >> Pictures >> This Device and browse to the original image file. Before clicking Insert, hit the small dropdown arrow next to the button and choose Insert (not Link to File). This bakes the image data directly into the .pptx file so it travels with the deck regardless of where you open it. If your source images live on a network share that goes offline periodically, this single change prevents the error from recurring. The same rendering failures that blank out entire slides often trace back to linked images as the root cause.

Convert all linked images at once

If you have dozens of linked images scattered across a large deck, converting them one by one is painful. Open the Edit Links to Files dialog, select all entries, and click Break Link for each one. PowerPoint converts every linked reference into embedded data on the spot. Save immediately afterward — this increases your file size (sometimes significantly with high-resolution photos), but it eliminates every single path-dependent failure in the presentation. Once broken, the links can’t be restored, so make sure you actually want permanent embedding before running through the list.

Fix corrupted or unsupported images

Resave in a compatible format

PowerPoint handles JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, and TIFF reliably across all recent versions. Newer formats like WebP and HEIC work in some Microsoft 365 builds but fail in others — the support depends entirely on which Windows image codecs are installed on that particular machine. If you inserted a WebP screenshot and it shows the display error, open the file in Paint, save it as PNG, delete the broken placeholder in PowerPoint, and reinsert the PNG version. This format conversion also fixes images with corrupted headers that photo viewers render without issue but PowerPoint silently rejects.

Compress oversized images

PowerPoint has internal dimension limits that vary by version and available system memory. Images wider than 4096 pixels or larger than roughly 20 MB can trigger display errors or cause the slide to render with a placeholder instead of the actual image. Select any working image on the same slide (or add a temporary one), go to Picture Format >> Compress Pictures, uncheck Apply only to this picture to compress every image in the deck, and pick a resolution target. For screen presentations, 150 ppi is more than enough. You can also optimize image sizing across Office apps using the same compression dialog in Word and Excel, which is useful when you’re pulling images from a shared asset library.

Repair a corrupted .pptx file

If every image in the deck is broken and the Edit Links dialog shows nothing linked, the file itself may be corrupted. Rename the .pptx extension to .zip, extract the archive, and look inside the ppt/media/ folder — your images should be there as individual JPEG and PNG files. If they’re missing or zero-byte, the corruption happened during save, possibly from a disk error or an interrupted OneDrive sync. Restore from a backup if you have one, check OneDrive’s version history for an earlier copy, or extract whatever intact images remain from the ZIP and rebuild only the affected slides.

Edge cases worth checking

Network drive and SharePoint images

Images stored on mapped network drives or SharePoint document libraries fail when the connection drops, the VPN disconnects, or IT remaps the drive letter during a maintenance window. Copy these images to a local folder first, reinsert them as embedded files, and delete the old linked references from the Edit Links dialog. This pattern is especially common in enterprise environments where mapped drive letters change between offices or after a domain migration.

Images that work on one PC only

This is the classic linked-image symptom. The images display perfectly on the machine where you built the deck because the file paths resolve locally, but break on any other computer where those paths don’t exist. The fix is the same: open Edit Links to Files, break every link, save the deck, and test it on a second machine before your next presentation. Going forward, always embed when you know the deck will travel.

Antivirus or security software blocking images

Some endpoint protection tools flag embedded images as potential threats, especially if the image metadata contains unusual fields or the file was downloaded from the internet. Check whether your security software quarantined the source image file. If the image is flagged, right-click the file in Windows Explorer, open Properties >> General, and click Unblock at the bottom of the dialog. Then reinsert it into PowerPoint.

Embed your images instead of linking them, stick to JPEG or PNG, and keep file dimensions under 4096 pixels — that prevents this error in the vast majority of cases.