This is still fricking happening. I'm on 30.1, Tahoe 26.3.1, Apple M1 Pro. I've already reset preferences and done a full re-instalment of illustrator and haven't had it happen in over a month. Just opened my file from yesterday and all the reference images are gone. Been using this software for over 10 years and it is absolute trash now!!!

EDIT: I was able to use Dropbox's version history to restore an older version with all the images still in it - hope that helps someone else.

Resetting preferences worked for me as a workaround but the issue pops up again every now and then which is very frustrating, especially when I lose a lot of work

Few moths ago I have the persistend error with the illustrator an dragged photos . I drag photos from photoshop to my illustrator artwork but few minutes later de photo dissapear and transform in kind of blanked photo. Have someboddy  the same problem?

Agreed with Ton, I updated both Illustrator and my Mac, but unfortunately I'm still getting this issue.

It can come back, as I just noticed, had to reset the prefs again.

Working on MacOS Sonoma 14.6.1 and using AI 29.7.1

In an Illustrator document where I've dragged and dropped smart objects from Photoshop, sometimes (but not always) these smart objects disappear from the Illustrator doc when exporting to a PDF, but are still visible in the Ai doc. Usually the issue is fixed by re-exporting the PDF, but of course, I'd like it not to happen in the first place. I don't want these objects disappearing on me :) Thanks for looking into this!

Hi Paula, if you have updated and all your Preferences settings are the way you like them, you can save them using Edit > My Settings > Export Settings... If the problem occurs again, you can easily go back to the saved settings with Edit > My Settings > Import Settings...

I'll update and see if that fixes the issue. I'll let you know if it stays the same. Thank you!

Hi Paula, I am currently on 29.7.1 on Sonoma 14.7.7

Hi Ton! I'm using the 29.5.1 version on a Mac with Sonoma 14.7.5

Paula, which version are you currently using? For me it has not come back since resetting preferences.

This is still an issue for me. I tried the Reset Preferences solution and, although it worked for some days, now it's still the same, imported screenshots keep disappearing. I don't think having to reset preferences every x time is a solution for this. Please, Adobe do something to fix this.

I'm working on Adobe Illustrator 2025 on desktop. I run it on a 2024 mac running Sequoia. When I drag print screens into my artwork they're disappearing, is there a way of fixing this? I've updated and it's still happening. It's really awful because me & my team at work make moodboards and all the artwork is disappearing.

Please help! You can still see where the print screen was with a bounding box but the image disappears.

When I reported the beta fixing things, the installation started with fresh settings (I haven’t had a beta installed before). So the fix mechanism was probably the same as with resetting preferences manually.

On Mac, if you take a screenshot (Command+Shift+4) and then drag it directly from the bottom right corner of your screen onto your art boards, some or all of the screenshots will appear blank after saving the file. This is happening on Mac OS 15.5, Adobe Illustrator 29.6.1

Thank you very much!! @gozaniki :-) IT WORKS!!

I have been experiencing the same issue for several months, and it has been quite troublesome.

Following the suggestion mentioned here, I tried Illustrator > Preferences > Reset Preferences, and it successfully resolved the problem.

Before applying the reset, when I pasted a screenshot directly from a browser into Illustrator, the image appeared to be embedded. However, the Links panel displayed a temporary file path under “File Location,” and that file would eventually disappear after some time.

After resetting the preferences, pasting an image no longer shows any file path under “File Location”; it remains embedded as expected.

I’m glad to see the issue has been resolved, although it’s still unclear what the root cause was.

@Geny, I thought I was kidding myself too, it is normally something I recommend when thing behave weird. Resetting worked for me in a beta version. Then I tried the latest regular version which still had the problem, resetting prefs fixed it. Then I tried downloading the latest Prerelease version, still problems, resetting Prefs fixed them.

@Ton OMG! I thought you were kidding... although I lost all my settings (I knew it would do that but I had to try) it DID work!!!

Today I did go to Settings > Preferences and clicked the Reset Preferences button. Somehow this fixed the problem with the disappearing images for me. Can someone else try this too?