Magento images not displaying in front end

Question

I can see images in the back end. On the front end of the catalog, no images appear for products, just the default "Image Not Found" icon.

Images definitely exist, eg

media/catalog/product/f/o/foo.jpg

They also appear to be correct in MySQL:

|        4 |           77 |       248 | /f/o/foo.jpg              |

I've cleared all MAgento's caches several times, even restarted the web server. It is not caused by the web server cache; I've disabled that. I even got a little desperate, ran the web server as root and chowned everything to 777, and uploaded new images, still nothing in the front end. I've followed everything I could find on Google and still nothing.

My web server is running php 5.3.2 with GD, it meets all Magento's requirements AFAICT.

Loaded PHP modules:

[PHP Modules]
apc
Core
ctype
curl
date
dba
dom
ereg
fileinfo
filter
gd
gettext
hash
iconv
json
libxml
mbstring
mcrypt
mysql
openssl
pcre
PDO
pdo_mysql
pdo_sqlite
Phar
posix
Reflection
session
SimpleXML
SPL
SQLite
sqlite3
standard
tokenizer
xml
xmlreader
xmlwriter
zlib

[Zend Modules]

Answer 1

The last time I saw this problem, the issue was that the webserver didn't have enough memory. Magento checks to see whether it has enough memory to create the new image w/ GD before creating it, and will use the default image instead if this isn't the case. Try increasing the memory available to PHP and see if it solves the problem.

Hope that helps!

Thanks, Joe

Answer 2

Just Rename your .htaccess file inside the /media directory to .htaccess-old. This will absolutely resolve your image issue.