Why do images disappear?

Question

I am developing a site with Drupal. I noticed that sometimes an image that was showing perfectly alright disappear all of a sudden, even though it is physically present in the file directory. And yet, it cannot be reached directly via url, which is why it doesn't show up on the page. Entering a direct url into the browser like this:

www.sitename.com/path/to/image.jpg

returns only a white page that contains the url of the page, in text form, but there is no image.

Why does this happen? Anyone know?

Answer 1

my guess, hard learned. Disk full ?

Answer 2

are you using imagecache? possibly there's something going wrong there