I've recently had trouble with Imagecache on some of our servers. People report various issues with imagecache when symlinks are used for the files directory (we do this to keep content and code separate). In our case Imagecache fails to create the preset directories **and** create images. Unfortunately Imagecache doesn't log this particular failure in either instance. I also have to configure the php open_basedir directive - perhaps this is what causes this particular issue. By comparing two installs I noticed the only different was the group write permissions on the Imagecache parent directory ( defaults to sites/default/files/imagecache ). On the working installation the apache group had write permission. On the failing install it didn't. The apache user had write permission in both cases. I've no idea why that causes Imagecache to silently fail but there you have it.