AnkiMobile Now Showing Persistent 'Image is Missing' Alerts After One-Way Sync

Anki Syncing & AnkiWeb
1

I use the AnKing deck synced via AnkiHub on a Mac desktop, iPhone, and iPad. For a long time, everything worked normally — no missing image alerts on any device.

What happened:
I ran into a situation where I needed to recover my collection. In the process, I signed out of AnkiWeb and AnkiHub on all devices, and performed a one-way sync from AnkiMobile (uploading from my phone to AnkiWeb as the source of truth). After doing this and re-syncing all devices, AnkiMobile began showing ‘An image is missing: [filename]’ banners on certain cards during review. This had never happened before.

The missing files appear to be images that were never actually distributed with the AnKing deck — filenames like ‘tmpXXXXX.png’ and ‘paste-XXXXXXXXX.jpg’, which appear to be locally-pasted images created by the original card authors that were never included in the shared deck. These references exist in the note fields of the cards but the actual image files don’t exist anywhere in the media folder on any device.

The core issue:
Before the one-way sync, AnkiMobile never alerted on these missing references — it appeared to silently skip them during review. After the one-way sync and subsequent re-sync across devices, AnkiMobile now actively alerts on every card that contains one of these dead references during review. The behavior changed even though the underlying card data (the dead image references) had been there all along.

Current situation:

  • Mac desktop Check Media: shows these files as missing (expected, they don’t exist)
  • iPhone and iPad: showing ‘An image is missing’ banner alerts during review for these same files
  • The alerts appear mid-review and are disruptive to studying

My questions:

  1. Is there a setting in AnkiMobile to disable or suppress the ‘An image is missing’ banner alert during review?
  2. Why did the one-way sync change AnkiMobile’s behavior from silently skipping missing references to actively alerting on them?
  3. Is there a way to restore the previous silent behavior without the alerts without using a backup? (scheduling outdated)
2

The one-way sync wouldn’t have changed any of the media attached in your account. And I can’t think of anything that has changed in AnkiMobile recently enough to create this sort of difference.

I suspect it has something to do with updates from AnkiHub. Perhaps a field that was protected, and now isn’t (or wasn’t protected and now is), so it has different data than it used to. Or a field that is now included in your card template, but wasn’t before, due to customizations you’ve made to the note type, or updates to the underlying note type on AnkiHub. This might appear be differently on different devices due to platform-specific formatting in the note type.

I’m not aware of a setting like that. You’ll probably have to fix the actual references in the notes or the note type. As I alluded to above – if that field isn’t on your card template, you won’t get an on-screen error. Or you should push this back on the deck maintainers to find out why these dead references are still in these notes.