Anki is not displaying an image correctly, but it is pasting the text of the image instead

Hey there,

Hope you’re all doing well! I’ve run into a bit of a pickle with Anki and could really use your expertise to sort it out.

Here’s the scoop: Anki seems to be acting up lately. When I paste images into my cards, instead of showing the actual pictures, it’s bizarrely displaying the text inside them. What’s even weirder is that this glitch is only happening to folks using my decks, not me personally.

I’ve never encountered this hiccup before, so it’s got me scratching my head. I’ve attached some screenshots to give you a visual of what’s going on.

If anyone has any ideas on how to fix this or has encountered a similar snag before, I’d be super grateful for your insight!

Thanks a ton for lending a hand, folks.



I think this could be 2 separate issues –

(A) Why am I getting random-character “alt” text with my images?

Could be many causes of this. It depends a lot on where you’re copying the images from, and how you’re copying them. You characterized it as “the text of the image” – but is it that? If it is, it’s an awful OCR version. It also might just be a gibberish artifact from the copying process.

It’s hard to tell you how to prevent it – you might just have to watch for it and adjust your process. But the cure for this note is to remove everything from alt=" through the end quote mark, just before src=".

You can see how widespread an issue this is in your collection by searching alt=. It may be worth some careful “Find and Replace” to get rid of all of it. Browsing - Anki Manual

(B) Why are folks using my shared deck seeing that text instead of the images?

Because they don’t have the images. That’s the whole point of “alt” text – it shows to replace an image that can’t be displayed. You can see in your screenshot of the note editor that the first thing in that field is a “broken image” icon. That means that Anki can’t find that file. It’s not happening to you because you have the images.

When you exported your apkg, did you tick “include media”? It’s always a good idea to test a file before you share it. You can do that by creating a new (temporary) profile and importing your apkg into that. Then you’ll see exactly what another user would see.

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