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Magento Nginx – Image thumbnails do not appear in the media manager

Symptoms

In certain server configurations, Magento cannot display image thumbnails in the Media Manager:

Cause

This was also caused by a bug in Magento. However, if you are using the latest Magento versions, it should be fixed and everything should display correctly. In some cases though, your server configuration prevents the images from being loaded.

As you can see in the following image, in such cases the requests return a 403 Forbidden response.

Analysis

Thumbnails in Magento are generated in the folder

/media/wysiwyg/.thumbs

As you can observe, there is a dot before the directory name, and some server configurations do not allow access to files or folders whose names are prefixed with a dot.

location ~ /. {
deny all;
}

This will result in anything prefixed with a dot triggering a forbidden access exception.
As a solution, you can override this rule by using a location directive with higher priority than a regex match, for example:

location ^~ /media/wysiwyg/.thumbs/ {
allow all;
}

Magento Nginx – Image thumbnails do not appear in the media manager