Inventor Insert Image Failure – Problem

This is a new one to me. I can no longer insert images in Autodesk Inventor! Trying to save a part with an inserted image first caused first a ‘Failure’, immediately followed by a ‘Problem’, which then lead to a crash.

The image below shows pretty well how things started. I was working on the tankless water heater BIM part seen in the image, and was performing the very last step – adding the logo image. Which went well as it always does …………………..until I hit save.

…so I’m thinking, WTF? Why?

When finished thinking, I clicked the ok button, and Blam! …another screen pops up informing me that the ‘Failure’ is now a ‘Problem’…

So I click OK again. Fortunately, a problematic failure was as far as things went….. until I tried to restart the program to see if that fixed things. It didn’t, and the program crashed on its way out just for good measure.

Tracking The Problem Down

The first suspect was the image format. The image I placed was in PNG format, so I tried BMP – still no luck.

My second suspect was the 3^rd Party information. There is a PDF and a Word document embedded in the part, so I created a fresh part, made a small extrusion, created a sketch on its face, and placed the image on it. Same error on save.

I then tried Jpeg as the format. I didn’t try jpeg as a cure earlier as jpeg was the problem awhile back. Back then, changing the format to a bitmap was the cure. But it needed to be ruled out, and it was.

Then, I decided to see if the size of the image was a problem. I have never had a problem with image size —in fact, there is a good sized image in a different part that I worked on just yesterday with no problems, but wanted to rule that out anyway.

So I made an image that was close to the final size needed and ran the test again. This time, no error. It was the size.

The original logo was 2400 x 3000 pixels, which was about ten times the size needed, but as far as images go, not very large. The file size is dramatically smaller than the imbedded user care pdf —211k vs. 3,410k. The file that worked was 21k. I would have liked to run a test to find out at what point the failure occurs, but haven’t the time at the moment.

If this is a known limitation, a file size warning would have been better than a pair of cryptic failure notices. I don’t believe it is though..