My Anki card images are all missing, and I don’t know what caused it. I made these cards a few months ago. I temporarily stopped using Anki because I was going through something, and I decided to return yesterday to study again. I updated the software and created a new deck to try something different. Today, when I checked my old decks, all the images were missing and only appeared as JPG icons.
I checked the collection media, and there were no images there.
I only use Anki on my Windows tablet, and I also tried logging into AnkiWeb on the same tablet and on my phone—it’s the same issue.
Please help me. I worked so hard making these cards, and it took a lot of time. I don’t think I have the energy or time to redo them. Attached are my screenshot. Thank you so much.
It’s not easy to lose files from your collection.media, unless you manually delete them yourself.
Are you sure you checked the right place – Managing Files - Anki Manual? Did you look in the correct profile folder? Your Check Media result says that you have thousands of “unused” files, so you should at least see those there. [Don’t try to delete those until we figure out what is going on.]
I checked the first “missing” file in your list – paste-0106289941c2e29bd3b417beee11b8cca14bde9d.jpg – and that looks like it still exists in AnkiWeb. Is one of us checking the wrong AnkiWeb account? I used the email address you used to post here – check Preferences > Syncing to see if you are using a different account.
I don’t know which image belongs to the note in your screenshot. In the note editor, you can click < > above the field to find the name of that file. Then you should check your collection.media directly for files with similar names.
On AnkiWeb, it also looks like you’ve deleted a lot of media from your collection recently (in the past month). Do you know what you did to cause that? It might be possible to restore that media, but I’m hesitant to do that unless/until we figure out what is going on.
You have synced an AnkiDroid install with your account in the past. Does that device have the images you’re looking for?
Omg, thank you so much for your response! I hope I understood your questions correctly and that the information I shared is helpful.
1. Sorry if I exaggerated earlier and said there were no images in the collection media. There are images and audio files there, but most of them are from the new deck I made yesterday. There are quite a lot since they seem to come from a premade deck (the new media files start with the name Dexter). The rest are older audio files from a premade deck that I believe I deleted a long time ago (most of them start with the name Yandex). That’s pretty much all the files I see there—the other old images are missing. I’ve attached a screenshot that shows the dates between those two sets of files (Sept 09, 2024 and Sept 21, 2025).
2. Yes, I’m using the same email for both my account here and the Anki account in question. I also attached a screenshot to show that the images are missing on AnkiWeb too, where only the JPG icons appear.
3. I followed your instructions and was able to get the file name of the missing image from the note I mentioned earlier. I tried searching for it in the collection media folder, but it wasn’t there. I’ve attached a screenshot as well.
4. I’m not sure what “recently deleted media” you were referring to, but I did delete some premade decks I created yesterday since I wasn’t satisfied with them. I made a few tweaks until I was happy, which resulted in the new deck with the Dexter files. Other than that, I don’t recall deleting any older cards yesterday—hopefully my memory is correct on that.
5. I no longer use the phone where I had AnkiDroid installed since it broke. I’m now using an iPhone, but I don’t have the app installed on it.
The filename is cut off in your screenshot, but is it paste-7bfb6bfb0d4160fcfd09884ef71618ed551865eb.jpg? If so, that currently exists on AnkiWeb, but it shows as having a 0 size, and I can’t download it – I’m not sure why.
Try this –
Preferences > Syncing > Log out – then click Sync and log in again. That will prompt a re-scan of your media and any additional media that exists on AnkiWeb will be redownloaded. Then run Check Media again, and see if the numbers change.
Deleting decks/notes/cards doesn’t delete the media that is attached to them. This is probably why you have thousands of unused media files still in your collection. That’s what the “Delete Unused Media” button is meant to clean up [but as I said, don’t use that until we figure this out.] Unless you ran a “Delete Unused” recently, that’s not the cause of that deleted media.
Try the above first, let’s see what changes – and I can try restoring the deleted media after that if necessary.
Okay. I’ve restored your deleted media on AnkiWeb for the past month. It should start downloading the next time you sync. Please be forewarned that it is ~21K files and 800 MB, so it might take several syncs to download it all.
I can tell you that the 2 files I named above still appear on AnkiWeb, and now have a size greater than 0, so hopefully this will restore what you need.
Why did this happen? –
The only times I’ve seen reports like this are when users have run automatic clean-ups or storage-space recovery on their device [or they’ve been doing something similar manually, and were over-aggressive], and they have inadvertently deleted a lot from their collection.media. If that sounds like something you have set up on your computer or something you’ve been doing – you should re-consider your approach.
When this is all done, and you’re happy with what you have – you should Check Media again, because I expect there will be a lot of media you’ll want to delete again. [Don’t try this until your device is fully synced with all the media, or sync will restore the files you delete.] Then sync again to remove those files from the server.
I haven’t checked all the cards yet, but I’ve noticed that many of them already have the missing pictures. Based on the screenshot, I guess the issue is already fully resolved. Thank you so much for all your help—I truly, truly appreciate it. I’m very grateful!
Great! Go ahead with the next step of running “Delete Unused” – and then syncing. That will remove the unnecessary media from AnkiWeb, but on your system, they will only be deleted as far as the media.trash folder. So if you notice any issues in the next few weeks, you’ll be able to recover any of the files you want – until you follow-up with the “Empty Trash” step.
Thank you once again for your help and for guiding me through the final step. I’ve just completed it, and I really appreciate the time and effort you put into resolving this for me.
