Overwriting attached images doesn't work

Question

Hello everyone,

I have a page with 20 images and need to make changes to those images.

I downloaded all the attached images, edited them in an external program and uploaded them again and was expecting that the changed images would automatically replace the old ones, but that is not the case.

When I go to "attached images" and click the images, I can see that they have changed but on the page it still shows the old versions.

Why is that? And what can I do to change that?

Going edit > insert > image is not an option since I also need to change image size and correctly position them on the page.

Joe Hockaday · Answer

I had this too. Obviously I had dragged and dropped my originals when I first wrote the page. When I changed them and updated the page it was fine in the edit view, but when I published it _always_ reverted to the original.

I had to delete the originals, publish, change the file names on my local disk, re-upload the new with the 'insert image' button and choose the files with the new names, publish and it then worked.

Thanks Steffen for the hint. No thanks Atlassian for no fix on this in nearly 4 years. About right for your software quality.

Steffen Heller · Answer

I found out what the problem is:

If you copy & paste images to a Confluence page, Confluence automatically renames them to something like "image2017-7-26 14:17:39.png".

And because of the colon in that name, it seems impossible to change and overwrite those images.

* If I download the images and unzip them, the ":" is changed to "_"
* If I open such images and I try to change "_" back to ":" I get messages "not allowed", "can't contain any of the following...", etc.

How can I avoid or circumvent this? Anybody have another idea?

Again, all I want to do is, download an image, make changes, upload it again and overwrite the old image...

Steffen Heller · Answer

Thanks Ann for the answer.

I am using Atlassian Confluence 4.3.7, Server.

Did you also try with an image whose size was changed in Edit mode? I was worried that changing the size of the image could create a new file that does not relate to the original file anymore.

If you change an image to a size smaller than 301 pixels the image path changes from
"/download/attachments/{some number}/{file name}" to
"/download/thumbnails/{some number}/{file name}"

Could this cause problems?