Issue

Photos saved in Microsoft SkyDrive never loads. Thumbnails folder view looks like this:

Trying to open individual pictures also doesn’t work. SkyDrive displays “Still retrieving high-quality photo. We’ll show it as soon as it arrives.” But photo is never loaded.

Cause

Issue was caused by OpenDNS service. It was configured to block “P2P/File sharing” (Settings in OpenDNS web console). This doesn’t block the main SkyDrive website, but seem to block some other subdomains where actual images are hosted. Confusingly there are no errors or warnings displayed, images are simply not shown.

By checking OpenDNS stats I found that blocked addresses are live.com subdomains, i.e.

• users.storage.live.com
• blufiles.storage.live.com
• byfiles.storage.live.com
• storage.live.com

Resolution

Issue was resolved by adding live.com to Never Block (whitelist) in OpenDNS settings. 

This allows live.com and all other subdomains.

Other potential solutions would be:

• Disabling “P2P/File sharing” block in Open DNS console
• Changing DNS to other provider (ISP, Google, etc.)

11.2012