When you use a desktop email client like Outlook, how your emails are displayed depends a lot on the settings of Outlook and that of your system, rather than of your email provider or server. If you have a Gmail account and you use a web-browser to login to your account directly through the web-based interface, you will most likely won’t have any issues with the compatibility or how the emails are viewed. Gmail and the browser take care of most of the things for you. (The browser may still hide images due to certain security settings, but in most cases, images when you browse emails in Gmail are not hidden).
Cannot See Images in Outlook – the reasons
If you cannot see images inside emails in Outlook, here are the reasons and how to get around those issues so that images can be displayed properly.
# 1
Outlook automatically hides images from spam folder by default. So, if you were wondering about images in spam emails, it is likely for a good reason that Outlook has blocked such content. In fact, Outlook will also convert all emails that go into spam into a plain text format, so that any harmful content may get inactive. If you are sure an email isn’t a spam and you want to see the content, move it back to inbox.
# 2
Outlook will also disable automatic downloading of images even for emails in inbox and other folders. This is because content like images and many others can have the potential of compromising your privacy. They can track your IP, location, computer specs, and other details. If you trust the source of the email, you can click on the link at the top of the email that says “Click here to download pictures”.
# 3
Upon right-clicking this message, you will get further options to add the sender to the safe list.
Once you add either the whole domain or the particular sender, Outlook will automatically download images for emails from those domains, so you don’t need to download them every time manually.
# 4
By clicking on “change automatic download settings” (which you can also find inside the trust center settings in Outlook), you can modify these options to your liking.
“The Linked Image Cannot be Displayed” error!
Even after you manually download the images or add the sender to the safe list, you sometimes might receive an error that Outlook cannot display the images.
The error message also says, “The file may have been moved, renamed, or deleted. Verify that the link points to the correct file.”
This is due to one particular option set inside “Internet Options”: Do not save encrypted pages to disk. If this is enabled, you will not be able to see images in Outlook properly and will see a red cross in the place of images. Disable this option to fix this issue.
- Open internet explorer and go to ‘Options’
- Go to the ‘Advanced’ tab and scroll down until you get to the security section
- Find the option for “Do not save encrypted pages to disk” and disable it.
- Restart Outlook and hopefully you will be able to see the images now.
Some users will find that the “do not save encrypted pages to disk” is enabled but the option is greyed out, not allowing you to disable it. In that case, you can disable it from the registry.
Warning:
It’s always a good idea to backup your registries before making any changes. Also, proceed with caution and make any changes carefully, as tweaking the wrong registry can harm your operating system and computer.
You can find the relevant registry here, inside the registry editor: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
And then on the right, the registry entry you want to modify is called “DWORD: DisableCachingOfSSLPages.” Right-click on it and enter the value 1.
Restart PC and hopefully the error related to displaying of images even for safe senders and domains will now be solved. We hope the troubleshooting tips given here helped you get rid of the problems and also to understand how Outlook behaves with the images in emails.