Mail will not show picture attachments iPad 3

[ericinboston]

Hi all. We have the iPad 3 (and just upgraded to OS 5.1.1 today to try and solve our problem). We noticed that 90% of the time when we try to look at a picture in an email (we are using Gmail and Yahoo), the following happens on almost all our emails:

-the picture icon exists in the email
-we tap the picture icon and the iPad downloads the picture over wifi
-the ipad/Mail program indicates the picture has been fully downloaded (say, 3.3MB)
-the picture does not show up...if we tap it, the little wheel spinny thing goes for 1/4 a second and stops...no error messages, nothing...and no picture of course.

We have numerous previous other emails (all from the same people) that still have pictures that are ok. It *seems* to be ok with PDF files but we only have 2-3 PDFs to try.

We powered off the iPad 2 times...upgraded to OS 5.1.1 and powered off...and also killed all the running apps by pressing the Home button twice and then killing the apps. It's not our wifi network as we can open emails and surf.

This is extremely frustrating and to the point where the iPad is useless for us. I can't call Apple because it is past the 90-day window...and I'm not driving 60 minutes to an Apple store.

Anyone seen this? Any ideas? This has been working fine for months and just started this morning. This problem does not occur on my iPhone 4s that is accessing the same mail accounts...so it's not Gmail or Yahoo to blame.

Thanks.

 

[Ashwood11]

How much "Available Storage" do you have?

 

[ericinboston]

How much "Available Storage" do you have?

32GB unit with 14GB free. I only have about 20 photos on it, the rest is music eating up the space.

 

[Ashwood11]

How large are the photos that don't load? Maybe they are too large.

 

[ericinboston]

How large are the photos that don't load? Maybe they are too large.

All photos are coming from iPhone 4 phones...so at most 5MB. In the past I've sent myself 9MB pix from my DSLR and they (then and now) still open just fine.

 

[Ashwood11]

Well, I have no idea. Sorry!…

Maybe they are not in a compatible format or corrupted.
Check Settings, Mail to make sure "Load Remote Images" is set to "On"

 

[ericinboston]

Well, I have no idea. Sorry!…

Maybe they are not in a compatible format or corrupted.
Check Settings, Mail to make sure "Load Remote Images" is set to "On"

They can't be corrupted if I can access them on other iOS devices and via a normal computer and the web interface.

Yes, the Load Remote Images is set but that truly has no effect on this problem...that feature is for HTML formatted emails that are embedding links to images on backend servers...like all those lovely store advertisements you receive. Attachments, regardless of what they are, are not remote images.

 

[ericinboston]

I found the answer...but first more steps that I took:

-powered off for over 30 mins...no help
-turned off wifi...noticed that the pix were now showing up in email
-turned wifi back on...the pix were now gone again and Mail just kept spinning (even though I could get new mail)
-...this made me think there was some kind of network hiccup on the iPad...but the powering off SHOULD have fixed that....
-I renewed my ip address, and it took the same address again...now it all works.

Chalk this up to another checkbox in the "************ about Apple's (and their fanboys) It Just Works" mantra.

Absolutely ludicrous that powering off, killing the Mail app, upgrading the iOS, etc. did not fix some kind of corruption that was ONLY affecting the Mail program.