Many times when we writing apps (not web browsers) we need to display something as html. And we want prettify that html with local images. And to do that we must type absolute paths to images - they can't be relative paths as expected (this is first bug). But under Windows path to image must be WITHOUT "file://" prefix, and under Linux it must be WITH "file://" prefix (this is second bug).
I can confirm this using a MinGW cross-compile from Linux, except that the proposed fix in this bug report does not work for me. When I use URLs in either the form "file:C:\path\to\file.jpg" or "file://C:\path\to\file.jpg" an outline of the image which is the proper size appears, but the image content does not appear. When I switch to just "C:\path\to\file.jpg" a tiny outline of an image that appear to be about 2px square is rendered instead. Identical code works perfectly in Linux.
@Greg Hellings Try this: <img src="C:/dir/subdir/file.gif"/>
Same results. Properly sized image outline (likely from anchor tag wrapping) but no image content.
I assume you are writing Qt based app. Are you checked whether your image format is supported by Qt library? (especially by Qt plugings) I was fighting with Qt when I deploy my app on fresh Windows system because not all image formats working as expected.