It skips them silently, or prints “Preview unavailable” where the picture should be. Upload the HTML export instead and every attached image comes back — rebuilt on your own machine, without uploading a thing.
Confluence Cloud · PDF / Word / HTML“Build PDF” opens your browser's print dialog — choose Save as PDF. Your browser's own engine keeps the text selectable and the page breaks sane, which in-page PDF libraries do not.
For a clean document, open More settings in that dialog and untick Headers and footers — otherwise Chrome stamps the date and this page's address onto every sheet.
The archive is opened by JavaScript on your machine. Load the page once, pull the network cable, and it still works.
No account, no server, no copy of your documents anywhere.
Space settings → Manage space → Export space → HTML. Pick
Custom export if you only need certain pages. Attachments travel inside the
archive under download/attachments/ — which is exactly what the built-in
PDF export fails to read.
No space-export rights?Space export is usually limited to space admins. Ask whoever administers the space to run it once and send you the ZIP.
Each image is matched back to the page that referenced it and restored at its real size. You get a list of the pages found, and you choose which ones go into the document.
Your browser renders it, so the text stays selectable, the fonts stay sharp and the page breaks stay sane.
Four faults account for nearly every report. Two of them you can fix at the source, and doing so also repairs Confluence's own export.
Images whose width was set to 0, or below roughly 16px, are dropped by the
renderer. Widths rewritten to zero during a migration are the usual culprit.
Fix it yourselfEdit the page, click the image, drag it wider than 16px, republish.
Attached PNG, JPG and SVG files come out as a placeholder — or as a paperclip icon — in both single-page and space exports. Reported on Confluence Cloud Free and Standard.
No fix at the sourceThis is what the rebuilder above is for: it takes the real attachment out of the archive and puts it back in the document.
An image inserted by URL rather than uploaded is not fetched when the PDF is generated, so it disappears.
Fix it yourselfDownload the image, attach it to the page, then re-insert it from the attachment.
A long-standing bug omits centered images from the exported PDF while left-aligned images on the same page survive.
Fix it yourselfSet the alignment to left and republish — or keep the centering and use the rebuilder.
Atlassian tracks several of these publicly — see Broken images in PDF export, CONFCLOUD-77137 and CONFSERVER-35945.
The faults above live inside Confluence's own renderer and cannot be patched from outside. What this page does is assemble a clean document from the export archive, which does contain your images.
Macros that Confluence renders on the fly — live filters, some charts, embedded apps — are not in the HTML export, so they cannot appear here either.
You get a clean document, not a pixel-faithful copy. If you need branded, scheduled or bulk exports at scale, that is what the paid Confluence exporter apps are built for.