You open the deck you finished last night. Every image is gone. Where each picture should be there’s a red X, sometimes with the text “This picture can’t be displayed”, sometimes with a more technical message like “The image part with relationship ID rld2 was not found in the file”. (We explain that exact message in detail in the PowerPoint red X image placeholder piece — useful if you’re trying to understand what the relationship ID actually means.) The text is intact. The slide layouts are intact. Three hundred slides, four months of work, and every photograph has been replaced by a thumb-print-sized rectangle with an X in it.

Take a breath. Whether the images are actually recoverable depends on where exactly the corruption happened. In most cases they are, but you have to know where to look, and you should do this before doing anything else with the file. Then we’ll get to prevention, because the prevention rules are stricter than Microsoft suggests and they’re the only thing standing between you and this happening again.

First: do not save the file again

Before any troubleshooting, before any “let me try opening it on another computer”, before any registry experiment — stop saving. If PowerPoint has opened the file and shown you missing images, do not click Save. Do not let AutoSave do anything. If the file is in OneDrive or SharePoint, the safest move right now is to disable your network connection temporarily, so AutoSave physically cannot push a new version up.

The reason: PowerPoint’s “saved” version of a damaged file may be more damaged than the version that’s there. Each save can prune relationships that PowerPoint couldn’t resolve, deepening the corruption rather than recovering from it. Your best chance of getting images back is to leave the file exactly as it is right now and work on a copy.

Once the network is off (or the file is local), make a copy of the file. Work on the copy. Keep the original untouched in case the recovery process makes things worse.

The recovery: the ZIP trick

A .pptx file is a ZIP archive. Inside the ZIP, embedded images live in a folder called ppt/media. If your images are corrupted in the presentation but still physically present in the ZIP, you can extract them and put them back in.

Step by step:

  1. In File Explorer, enable file extension display (View → Show → File name extensions in Windows 11; View tab → File name extensions in Windows 10).
  2. Make a copy of the .pptx file. Right-click → Copy → Paste into the same folder.
  3. Right-click the copy → Rename → change .pptx to .zip. Click Yes when Windows warns you about changing extensions.
  4. Double-click the .zip file to open it in Explorer (or use 7-Zip or any archive tool).
  5. Navigate to ppt/media inside the archive.
  6. Look at what’s there.

What you see in ppt/media tells you almost everything you need to know. Three possibilities:

The folder is full of images. Image1.jpg, image2.png, image3.jpeg, dozens of them. This is the good outcome. Your images are physically present in the file. What’s broken is the relationship between the slides and those images — the XML file that says “slide 4 uses image7.png” has been damaged or stripped. Extract every file in ppt/media to a folder on your desktop. Now you have all your image assets. You’ll re-insert them into the slides manually, but you haven’t lost the source material.

The folder is mostly empty. A handful of images present, dozens missing. The corruption is deeper than just relationships — the embedded image data itself has been pruned from the file. You can extract what’s there, but the rest is gone from this file. Move on to checking AutoRecovery and version history.

The folder is entirely empty. The .pptx contains the slide structure and text but none of the image binaries. This is the worst case and means the original file is unrecoverable for image content. AutoRecovery and version history are your only paths.

This ZIP-trick approach is so important and so under-publicised that Microsoft’s own support documentation hides it. There is one Microsoft Support article that mentions it (titled, unhelpfully, “Extract files or objects from a PowerPoint file”), but it’s framed as a power-user tip rather than as the first step in image-loss recovery. Most people who lose images never find this.

The “rld2 not found” error specifically

If the error you’re seeing is The image part with relationship ID rld2 was not found in the file (the ID number varies — rld1, rld5, rld12), that’s the relationship-XML version of the problem. PowerPoint’s slide XML refers to images by ID. The relationship file (.rels) maps those IDs to actual files in ppt/media. If the relationship file got corrupted or the mapping was lost during save, you get this error even when the images are still physically in the ZIP.

In this case, the ZIP-trick recovery almost always succeeds because the image data is intact. You re-insert the images manually into the affected slides and the new image gets a new, valid relationship ID. Tedious for a large deck, but at least the content is recoverable.

This error class showed up most aggressively in PowerPoint 2013, when there was a specific build that produced these failures on save. The pattern recurs intermittently in current 365 builds, particularly around OneDrive sync conflicts. Microsoft has issued targeted fixes through Click-to-Run updates but the underlying class of bug hasn’t been fully eliminated. (We track every confirmed image-related regression by build and KB number in the Microsoft Office image regression timeline — worth checking if you suspect your specific Office build is the cause.)

AutoRecovery and Version History

Two more chances before you give up:

AutoRecovery files: PowerPoint saves periodic recovery snapshots while you work. File → Open → Recover Unsaved Presentations. On Windows, the AutoRecovery folder is at %appdata%\Microsoft\PowerPoint\ by default. Look for .pptx or .asd files with recent timestamps. If you find one with a timestamp from before the corruption event, it may have intact images. Open each candidate read-only, check if the images are present, and if you find a good one, immediately Save As to a new filename in a separate location.

Version History: If the file lives in OneDrive or SharePoint, version history is your friend. In OneDrive web, right-click the file → Version history. You may have up to 500 versions stretching back weeks. Open older versions and check for intact images. Crucially: don’t restore in place. Each version listed is openable individually — open versions until you find one with intact images, then Save As to a separate filename. Restoring in place can trigger another sync round that propagates the broken state.

A common pattern: the most recent five or six versions all show the same corruption (because they all came from the same sync conflict event), but a version from earlier the same day is fine. Walk back through versions until images return. This works frequently enough to be the first thing to try if your file is in OneDrive or SharePoint.

If the file was on a local disk with no version history and no AutoRecovery snapshot survived, and the ZIP ppt/media folder is empty, the file is gone for image content. There is no magic recovery tool that will get them back; the data isn’t there.

Now: why this happened

Understanding the cause is the only thing standing between you and the same incident next month. The causes break down into four categories.

Cause 1: editing files directly on USB drives or external storage.

When PowerPoint saves a .pptx, it writes a temporary file, then atomically replaces the original. On a USB drive or network share with intermittent connectivity, that atomic swap can fail partway through, leaving the file in an inconsistent state. The image binaries get pruned, the relationships break, the next open shows red Xs.

The rule: never edit a .pptx directly on a USB stick, SD card, external drive, or unreliable network share. Copy the file to your local drive, edit there, then copy back. Yes, this is annoying. It also prevents this specific failure mode entirely.

Cause 2: OneDrive/SharePoint sync conflicts.

The most common modern cause. You’re working on a deck stored in OneDrive. PowerPoint AutoSave is on. Someone else opens the file. Or your network drops momentarily. Or your machine sleeps mid-save. The conflicting writes produce a file that looks fine until you reopen it.

The rule: turn off AutoSave for any single-author deck where you do not want concurrent editing. Use File → Save (Ctrl+S) explicitly, at moments when you know the network is up and the file is in a known-good state. AutoSave is a productivity feature for genuinely collaborative documents. For a deck you’re building alone, it’s a liability.

Cause 3: paste-from-browser quirks.

Pasting images directly from a browser into PowerPoint can produce a deck where the “images” are actually references to the source URLs rather than embedded copies. When you later open the deck on another machine or after a delay, the references can’t be resolved and you see red Xs.

The rule: never paste images directly from a browser. Save the image to disk first, then Insert → Pictures → This Device. The extra step takes ten seconds and produces a properly embedded image.

Cause 4: linked images instead of embedded.

Insert → Pictures gives you two options: Insert (embeds the image data) and Insert as Link (stores a reference to the file path). If you used Insert as Link and then moved, renamed, or deleted the source files, or opened the deck on a different machine, the links break and you see broken-image placeholders.

The rule: for almost all use cases, embed rather than link. The file size growth is worth the reliability. Linked images make sense only when you have very large image assets that change frequently and you need the deck to pick up the latest version automatically — a narrow set of use cases. The PowerPoint embedded vs linked images piece covers when each approach actually makes sense.

The PowerPoint configuration that prevents this

A few settings worth changing once, then forgetting:

  1. File → Options → Save → AutoRecover information: set the interval to 5 minutes rather than the default 10. Keep “Keep the last autorecovered version if I close without saving” checked.

  2. File → Options → Save → Save to Computer by default: check this if you want to default new files to local storage rather than OneDrive. This is preference; some teams genuinely benefit from default cloud saves. The point is to make the decision deliberately.

  3. AutoSave (the toggle in the title bar): off by default for personal decks, on only for collaborative ones. The icon is right there at the top of the window; flip it to off when you start a personal deck and you’ll skip the most common cause of this failure mode entirely.

  4. Update Microsoft Office: stay on a current build. Some of the historical image-disappear bugs were build-specific regressions that Microsoft fixed in subsequent updates. Help → Office Account → Update Options → Update Now.

  5. Don’t compress on save for any deck where you might need to recover original images later: File → Options → Advanced → Image Size and Quality section → check “Do not compress images in file”. This bulks up your file but preserves originals.

What I’d skip

A few tactics get suggested in forums that don’t help and sometimes make things worse:

“Open and Repair” from File → Open: PowerPoint’s Open and Repair is mostly useful for files with corrupt XML that prevent opening at all. For images-disappeared cases where the file opens but shows red Xs, repair rarely improves things and sometimes prunes the relationships further.

Save As to a different format and back: Save As to .ppt (the older binary format) or to .odp and back to .pptx is sometimes suggested as a “reset”. It will usually destroy any remaining image data permanently. Don’t do this until you’ve extracted whatever you can from the ZIP.

Third-party “PowerPoint repair” tools: most of these are wrappers around the same ZIP-extraction technique you can do yourself, with a paid licence on top. A handful do legitimate deep XML repair, but for image-disappear cases specifically, they cannot recover data that isn’t physically present in the file. Manual ZIP extraction is free, faster, and more transparent.

The bigger lesson: PowerPoint image loss is almost always preventable, and when it happens it’s almost always partially recoverable. The combination of “edit on local storage, embed don’t link, AutoSave off for personal decks, current build” prevents the vast majority of cases. And when it does happen, the ZIP trick is the first move, not the last resort.