Drupal errors like ‘drupal error generating image’ are very annoying on the website.

This is one of the typical errors that occur due to a few reasons which include permissions errors, unavailability of JPEG library and many more.

At Bobcares, we often receive requests to fix drupal errors as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s know the causes for drupal error generating an image to occur and see how our Support Engineers fix it.

What causes drupal error generating image to occur?

This error can cause due to many different reasons. The top reasons for this error ‘drupal error generating image’ are

1. Image Size

Few customers use some sort of slider on the website to slideshow the website contents or images. Sometimes, this slider doesn’t pull the images if its size is very large.

Hence, resizing the images can help to resolve this error.

2. PHP GD extension in Drupal

The GD library is very essential in the website and for the images to load. Also, a JPEG library must be configured with it.

Without a JPEG library, it will create problems.

3. Bad Permissions

Permissions are the core part of any files or folders to work perfectly. If the right permissions are not set then it will throw errors.

So the permission of sites/all/files/styles needs to be right.

How we fix the drupal error generating image?

We have now checked the different reasons for this error to occur. Now, let’s look into different occasions where our customers experienced this error. And we will see how our Support Engineers fix it.

1. Enabling the GD library with JPEG library

We recently received a request from our customer to fix the drupal error. On analyzing the error the customer was also experiencing GD library errors as well.

Here, the GD library was available but without the JPEG library configuration. So, the server will display that the GD library installation is present. However, there is a hidden requirement of JPEG to exist as well.

Also in the GDToolkit.php the below line also causes the function imagecreateformjpeg to fail

$function = 'imagecreatefrom' . image_type_to_extension($this->getType(), FALSE);

So, our Support Engineers fixed this error by running the below commands:

# Install GD
RUN apt-get install -y libfreetype6-dev libjpeg62-turbo-dev libpng12-dev
RUN docker-php-ext-configure gd --with-freetype-dir=/usr/include/ --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/include/
RUN docker-php-ext-install gd

This enabled the JPEG library to configure with the GD library.

2. Fixing the permissions to avoid generating image error

One of our customers set up a few image styles, for example, “Content_teaser”.

Where the image should be displayed. However, when the customer clicks on “View image” an error displays saying “Error generating image”.

Our Support Engineers started troubleshooting the error by checking if the directory sites/default/files/styles directory is writeable by the webserver user.

To ensure that the user can access the style files, we ran the below command to change the permissions

sudo chmod -R ug+rw sites/all/files/styles

And ran the below command to change the file owner

sudo chown -R [webserver_user] sites/all/files/styles

Running the below command shows broken images as an indication.

drush generate-content

Finally,   After changing permissions of the folder the error was resolved.

[Need assistance with drupal errors? – We’ll  help you]

Conclusion

In short, the drupal error generating image is caused due to many reasons which include improper permissions, unavailability of JPEG library with GB library and many more. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers fix this error.