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Invalid images are silently ignored

If the image specification in the metadata file specifies a path to an image which cannot be displayed, the error is silently ignored and the placeholder image is shown. The user will only realize this when checking the Sharing Platform manually.

There are multiple cases where this happens:

  1. The path points to a file which does not exist.
  2. The path points to a file which is not a supported image format (e.g. svg).
  3. The image is represented by a URL which does not return an image in a valid format.

The first case can easily be checked when indexing.

The second case might also be detected during indexing, but for that we need a way to identify a file's format and a list of supported formats. Detecting corrupted files might not be possible, but for most cases this should be sufficient to alert users about invalid formats.

The third case cannot be detected in general, since the server might return different item at different times. I think it might be best to disallow URLs, since loading images from an arbitrary URL identifies our users to the corresponding server.