Common issues with the pipeline.
Updated
variants_ready=false long after uploadThe Celery task failed. Check variants_error on the MediaFile record — it contains the last error message. Common causes: the source file on Spaces was deleted, or the image is corrupted.
Expected. The pipeline skips GIFs and SVGs to preserve animation and vector fidelity. The original URL is returned for these.
Run the ACL backfill: python manage.py fix_cdn_acls (from the api app) — although variants are uploaded with ACL=public-read, any object missing the ACL can be repaired by that command.
Confirm version incremented on the MediaFile record. If it did but the frontend is still showing the old image, your client code is probably hardcoding v1 — always use the variants array returned by the API instead of constructing URLs manually.