Open a document, scroll to where a picture should be, and instead you get an empty rectangle with a thin border. Search the problem and you will get one answer, repeated everywhere, with total confidence: turn off Show Picture Placeholders. Go to File > Options > Advanced, find the checkbox, untick it, done.

That advice is correct for exactly one of the three reasons Word shows boxes instead of images. For the other two — which are, in our experience, the more common ones — it does nothing at all. Worse, a lot of the people being handed this fix are running a version of Microsoft 365 where the checkbox no longer reliably exists, so they go hunting for a setting that isn’t there and conclude their Word is broken.

So before you touch any setting, work out which box you actually have. There are three, they look almost identical, and the fix for each is completely different.

The three kinds of box

A box where a picture should be is a symptom, not a diagnosis. The three causes are:

  1. The placeholder box — Word is deliberately not drawing the image to save effort, because the Show Picture Placeholders setting is on. The image data is fine.
  2. The broken-link box — the image was linked rather than embedded, and Word can no longer find the source file. The image data is gone from the document.
  3. The rendering box — Word is failing to draw an image it does have, usually because of a graphics-acceleration fault or a view/display setting. The image data is fine but the screen won’t show it.

The quickest way to tell them apart is to try printing the page to PDF, or to switch on Print Preview. A placeholder box and most rendering boxes will print correctly even while showing a box on screen. A broken-link box will print as a box too, because there is genuinely nothing to print.

Box type one: the placeholder box

This is the one the forums are talking about. Show Picture Placeholders is a performance feature left over from an era when rendering images slowed Word down on weak hardware. With it on, Word reserves the space an image occupies but draws an empty box instead of the picture, so the document scrolls faster.

If this is your problem, the fix is the famous one: File > Options > Advanced, scroll to the Show document content section, untick Show picture placeholders, click OK. Your images return immediately, in every view.

But here is the catch nobody mentions, and it is the single most useful thing to know about this setting. Show Picture Placeholders only affects images that are set to “In Line with Text.” Microsoft’s own documentation is explicit about this: the option has no effect on any picture using a wrapping style other than in-line. So if your image floats — wrapped as Square, Tight, Behind Text, or In Front of Text — and it is showing as a box, this setting is categorically not the cause, no matter how many forum posts tell you to toggle it. If you are not sure what wrapping your image uses, our guide to how Word image anchors actually work covers the difference between inline and floating images and why it changes the behaviour of so many other things.

The other catch is version-specific. In the perpetual releases — Word 2016 through 2024 — the checkbox is where it has always been. In recent Microsoft 365 builds, Microsoft has been quietly removing or relocating it, and several users report the option simply no longer appears under Advanced. If you cannot find the checkbox, you are not going mad and your installation is not corrupt. It means two things: the setting is not your problem (if it were on by default, you would not be able to turn it off either), and you should stop looking for it and move to the other two causes.

One more tell: a true placeholder box is clean — a plain bordered rectangle, sometimes with the image’s filename inside. If your box contains fragments of other images, flickering content, or random coloured noise, that is not the placeholder setting. That is a rendering fault, covered below.

This is the cause people most often misdiagnose as a placeholder problem, because the symptom looks the same and the placeholder fix is the first thing they try.

When you insert a picture, Word gives you two options behind the Insert button’s dropdown: Insert (the default, which embeds a copy of the image inside the document) and Insert and Link or Link to File (which stores only a pointer to the original file on disk). Linked images keep the document small, but the instant the source file is moved, renamed, deleted, or sent to someone who doesn’t have it, the link breaks and you get a box — frequently with a small red X or an error caption inside.

No setting fixes this, because there is nothing in the document to display. You have two real options. If you still have the original image file, delete the broken object and re-insert the picture, this time choosing plain Insert so it embeds. If you don’t have the original, the image is not recoverable from inside Word — the document never contained it.

Our position on this is firm: unless you have a deliberate asset-management workflow that depends on linked images, always embed. The file-size saving from linking is rarely worth the risk of a document that silently turns its pictures into boxes the moment it leaves your machine. If you also see error text rather than a clean box, the related message and its causes are covered in “This image cannot currently be displayed” — the wrap-style cause.

Box type three: the rendering box

This is when Word has the image, the image is embedded, the placeholder setting is off (or absent), and you still get a box. Now you are looking at a display problem rather than a content problem.

The most common culprit by a wide margin is hardware graphics acceleration conflicting with your display driver. This is the cause behind boxes that show garbled fragments, flicker when you scroll, or change content when you resize them. The fix: File > Options > Advanced, scroll to the Display section, and tick Disable hardware graphics acceleration, then restart Word. If that resolves it, the underlying issue is your graphics driver, and updating it is the longer-term fix.

A handful of view and display settings can also produce boxes, and they tend to travel together. Floating images vanish into boxes when you are in Draft or Outline view, when Show drawings and text boxes on screen is unticked, when Use draft quality is on, or when Show field codes instead of their values is on. Switch to Print Layout view and check those four settings under Advanced before assuming anything is broken.

How to diagnose it in under a minute

Run these checks in order and you will land on the right cause without guessing:

  • Does it print or export to PDF correctly? If yes, the image data is fine — you have a placeholder box (if inline) or a rendering box. If it prints as a box too, you have a broken link.
  • Is the image inline or floating? If it floats and shows a box, rule out the placeholder setting entirely. Look at rendering and view settings instead.
  • Is the box clean or garbled? Clean and bordered points to the placeholder setting or a broken link. Garbled, flickering, or fragment-filled points to graphics acceleration.
  • Can you find the Show Picture Placeholders checkbox at all? If not, you are on a build that has dropped it — move straight to the link and rendering checks.

The honest summary

Show Picture Placeholders earned its reputation as the go-to fix because, when it is the cause, the fix is instant and dramatic — boxes become pictures with one click. That memorable success is exactly why it gets prescribed for every box problem, including the many it cannot touch.

If your boxed images are inline and the checkbox is ticked, untick it and move on. If your images float, if the boxes are garbled, or if the checkbox isn’t even there, stop chasing that setting. You almost certainly have a broken link or a rendering fault, and ten more attempts at the placeholder toggle will not change a thing. And if the picture won’t go back in at all once you’ve sorted the display, that’s a different problem covered in why Word can’t insert the picture from the specified file.