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On-Screen Takeoff - How to Troubleshoot Plans Not Displaying or "Missing" - OST

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Symptom

Sometimes, you access a project and the images are not displayed. You may receive a "Missing Image Assistance" warning, you may see a red bar at the top of the Image Tab indicating the image cannot be displayed, or sometimes, the image just is not displayed and there is no banner or warning shown.

Possible Reasons

When you added the images to your project, the images were on a CD and the CD is not in the CD-ROM drive at the moment or the CD drive is not running

The images were saved to a network location and connectivity to that location is down or the drive letter of the drive has changed (in a multi-users/shared environment ALL users should have their drives mapped the same way).

The images are stored on the hard drive and they have been moved or deleted.

There is a memory issue causing On-Screen Takeoff to not be able to display the image - try shutting down other programs and utilities that are currently running such as: Microsoft Outlook ©, CAD programs, etc. (you may need to restart your computer to free up memory).

The Image layer is turned off - see OST - 05.02 What Are Layers? Why and How to Use Custom Layers for details on showing/hiding layers.

Tips

Copy the files off of your CD-ROM containing plans into a permanent location before you add them to your project (instructions are in the Help file)
Store image files for all of your projects in a specific location and create a subfolder in that location for each of your projects (before creating the project in On-Screen Takeoff) that will make locating project documents in the future much easier. By default there is a folder named C:\OCS Documents\OST created during program installation where On-Screen Takeoff looks for image files this is a good location for plan storage unless you and other members of your estimating team need to access those plans or you are using an SQL/Shared database.
Establish a set system of storing project plans. Once you establish a procedure for downloading and storing plans, you will reduce the likelihood that images will be misplaced, deleted or changed. Once you set up a set procedure, publish it and enforce it.
If you have a project that is being shared by more than one user and you are storing your plans on a server, make sure that the users have the same drive mappings. Contact your IT department for assistance.

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