DW8: image won't display in Design View

Question

Folks:
DW8 on MacOS 10.4.8 (fully updated) on Intel iMac.
What would keep an image from displaying in DW Design View?
What are the causes of the grey box with the superimposed "X"? Is
there any diagnostic output that might help? Is the grey box and
"X" substituted by DW8 for an invalid or un-drawable graphic, or is
this done by the OS?
The problem:
I've got a 1912 x 1481 graphic, a geographic map, in AI that
I'm trying to use as an ordinary web image, but DW won't display it
in Design View. Instead all I see is a big grey box and "X". For
test purposes, I'm starting from a new "Basic" HTML web page and
all I'm doing is inserting this one image. I need to get this
working so I can draw hotspots on this graphic to make it
"clickable" .
Here's what I've tried:
o Triple-checking that the inserted image reference is
correct. Yes, the image file is correctly linked. With the image
selected, the inspector shows a tiny but recognizable miniature of
the expected image. Further, when the page and the image are
uploaded to the web server and I look at it via a browser, the
expected image is _always correctly displayed.
o Exporting the graphic "for the web" from AI as both a GIF
and a medium-quality JPG. Neither of these are displayed in Design
View; both are served up correctly after being uploaded
o I found a larger JPG on a different site I'm managing. This
always displays as expected in both DW Design View and when served
up. I substituted the failing map JPG image. The result: A grey
box.
o Checking the map images: The JPG and GIF versions seem to
be visible in all environments (image readers, browsers, etc.) I've
checked _except_ DW8 Design View.
o Checked on another system. I made the failing image
available to a very helpful ACE, who performed a similar
experiment. It worked fine for him. I used his exact HTML and
directory structure -- and it failed for me. Grey box with "X".
It seems to me that I've checked most of the obvious
possibilities. Now it is time to check the less obvious ones.
Suggestions are very welcome!
Thanks,
Henry

Answer 1

Randy:
Thanks for your response.
This is a virtual memory system, so -- in theory-- it should
accommodate anything that will fit on the hard drive, more or less,
if I'm wiling to wait the hours (days?) it will take to swap on and
off the disk. That assumes DW8 takes advantage of the capability.
It may not.
"Larger"? The JPG image I compared to is 1692 x 2160 pixels,
but weighs slightly less, 289K bytes. I'm losing track of all my
test images that fail, but a representative one is 1912 x 1481
pixels and weighs 332Kb on the disk. "Roughly comparable" might be
a better description. The point is still reasonable: DW8 does
handle images of this size on my system.
One issue that occurred to me recently is that I may have
caused some grief by monkeying with the "Save for web" settings at
the Illy export. Perhaps I asked for some configuration that's
normal for Illy to export --or it would have warned me, I hope--
but too strange for DW to grok. DW should complain more
informatively than painting a gray box and "X" when that happens, I
would think.
Henry