Introduced in #5789
In early September 2026, Whitehall shipped a change to images to bring them in line with attachments: they’re now uploaded to the draft stack by default, only being made live when the associated document is published. Access-limiting and auth-bypass options are proliferated through to the images too.
Where a document embeds more than one image, a user visiting the page ‘cold' will be missing the session cookie for the asset manager, and all of the images on the page will each independently try to set up the session. The handshakes and callbacks all happen in a non-deterministic order, and more often than not, the authentication step fails. The result is a page with a number of draft images that simply don’t render, even with a refresh or a cookie clear.
The PR fixes this by waiting for a page load event, checking if there are at least two images on the page, then dynamically requesting a known good draft asset. This forces a session to be established, at which point the images in the page can be reloaded.
When can we pay it down?
Likely paydown is when signon can set up all required sessions on the asset server on login (the way it does for the pages themselves). Whitehall are tracking this work here: https://gov-uk.atlassian.net/browse/PTD-166
Introduced in #5789
In early September 2026, Whitehall shipped a change to images to bring them in line with attachments: they’re now uploaded to the draft stack by default, only being made live when the associated document is published. Access-limiting and auth-bypass options are proliferated through to the images too.
Where a document embeds more than one image, a user visiting the page ‘cold' will be missing the session cookie for the asset manager, and all of the images on the page will each independently try to set up the session. The handshakes and callbacks all happen in a non-deterministic order, and more often than not, the authentication step fails. The result is a page with a number of draft images that simply don’t render, even with a refresh or a cookie clear.
The PR fixes this by waiting for a page load event, checking if there are at least two images on the page, then dynamically requesting a known good draft asset. This forces a session to be established, at which point the images in the page can be reloaded.
When can we pay it down?
Likely paydown is when signon can set up all required sessions on the asset server on login (the way it does for the pages themselves). Whitehall are tracking this work here: https://gov-uk.atlassian.net/browse/PTD-166