PowerPoint Mac 2016: The image part with relationship ID rId2 was not found in the file.

I am on a corporate 365 account, I have 15.22 for Mac, the problem just started for me. It has NOTHING to do with remote drives or Flash drives. I do have an SSD as most modern Macs do.

If PPT is treating THAT as a Flash drive... and barfing images because of that... then the Mac product is a total fail.  

I was creating wireframe images in Illustrator, pasting them into Photoshop, and then copy pasting directly into a rather long PPT. Please consider me a cautionary tale for copy paste; it will inevitably lead to the heartbreak of relationship ID rld2 not found. Weirdly, this workflow used to work just fine for me in previous versions. :(  Now I am exporting all the images to a subdirectory and re-importing them. I use safe names of course, no hyphens or weird characters. This seems to have worked for my latest deck. Fingers crossed! 

Unfortunately when this corruption is triggered, it blows away the corporate graphics as well. So I have to continually replace all my title pages from the original corporate template, about 50% of the time I make a change to a deck (even a typo correction), for every presentation I do now. I have no workaround for that. 

Come on, Microsoft, support your own damn product already and fix this Mac issue! 

Designers everywhere are spending hundreds of hours in rework, costing our employers millions in lost productivity, all because of this stupid problem. We will come to despise you if you don't fix it - or at least publish an efficient workaround. 

CWOT. 

(yes I know this is a user forum, I just needed a little rant this morning)

This is not applicable on Macs, which is what the OP is using.

This is the most ridiculous error I have ever seen. You HAVE to store files on removable media given the size of SSD drives. And Dropbox (and the like) are the norm for sharing and storing files these days. This is an incredibly serious problem.

Let's all face it, we've all lost hours of work on this problem and Microsoft has done nothing to fix it. They obviously aren't even reading these forums. I actually don't think there is anybody there. I just bought the new PPT version 15.21.1 for Mac, it gave me this error and now I feel like a fool. I wish I could get my money back somehow.

This is the last straw for me. I know my clients won't like it because they are used to Powerpoint, but soon they will have this problem too. As I see it, Powerpoint has been abandoned by Microsoft. Truthfully I don't blame them, its always been a terrible app. It only survived because it was part of Office and it was just "there". 

There is the option of Google's slide web app, although they will likely discontinue it eventually. I guess Keynote here I come.

Don't waste your time on this string anymore and don't bother going back through it to read all the comments hoping for a solution. I did that. There is no fix and Microsoft could care less about this problem.

Same problem using version 15.21.1

Many hours wasted on a collaborative project.

Unacceptable.

Also have had problems using Endnote 7 with Word 2016 and have had to go back to the 2011 version of word because the new one crashes when reformatting references for documents with text boxes in it.

Microsoft needs to reassess image handling in both programs.

Or are we dealing with a company "Too big to fail" here.