Half of media images vanished, showing only empty rectangles with filenames

I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing this issue with images appearing as empty rectangles! This is definitely frustrating, but it's often a browser-related problem rather than an actual data loss issue.

The most common fix: Force quit and restart your browser

Based on similar reports in the Sanity community, this issue is frequently caused by browser caching problems, particularly in Safari. The solution that has worked for others:

1. Force quit your browser completely (don't just close the window)
   • On macOS: Command + Option + Esc, select your browser, click "Force Quit"
   • Or right-click the browser icon in the Dock and choose "Force Quit"
2. If you're using a terminal like Warp, restart that too
3. Reopen your browser and Studio

This often immediately resolves the empty rectangle issue because it clears problematic cached data that was preventing images from rendering properly.

Try a different browser

If the restart doesn't help, test your Studio in Chrome or Firefox. If images appear fine there, it confirms this is a Safari-specific display issue rather than missing data.

Update your Sanity packages

While your CLI version is 3.37.0, it's worth ensuring your Studio packages are up to date. Run:

npm install sanity@latest

You can also use:

npx -y sanity@latest upgrade

This updates your sanity package and related dependencies to their latest compatible versions based on your package.json.

Check your browser console

Open your browser's Developer Tools (Command + Option + I on macOS) and look at the Console tab for any error messages when the Studio loads. This can reveal if there are network issues, CORS errors, or problems loading from cdn.sanity.io.

Important: Your images likely aren't actually gone

The fact that you can see filenames suggests the asset references still exist in your content. This is almost certainly a display/rendering issue rather than data loss. The images are still in your Content Lake; your browser is just having trouble rendering them.

If none of these steps work, I'd recommend reaching out on the Sanity community Slack with details about which browser/version you're using and any console errors you're seeing. The community is very helpful with these kinds of issues!