Forum Discussion
Issue with siplay a picture “The picture can’t be displayed”
I worked for many days on a document that contains a very large number of images. When I reopened it, every single image was replaced by an error/placeholder message (e.g., “The picture can’t be displayed” / “The image cannot be displayed”).
After troubleshooting with Microsoft Support, we discovered the document had been saved/handled as OpenDocument Text (.odt) (OpenDocumentText) instead of a standard Word Document (.docx). Support attempted format changes/conversions, but the issue remains. I urgently need a way to recover the images/content from the existing file and guidance to prevent this from happening again.
Any idea about how to solve it? Thank you in advance
1 Reply
Your images are most likely still contained within the .odt file, but they are not rendering properly in Microsoft Word. A practical recovery method is to treat the .odt file as a compressed archive and extract the embedded image assets directly.
To resolve the issue, rename the file extension from .odt to .zip, then open the archive and locate the Pictures folder. This folder typically contains all embedded images, which can be copied and reinserted into a new Word document.
For future work, ensure that documents are saved in the native Word format (.docx) rather than OpenDocument (.odt). This will help maintain compatibility and prevent display errors when handling images or other embedded content.
