 <p>What version of Django are you using? </p> <p>Can you post the generated HTML code? if the URL works when you copy and paste in the browser, it might be an html issue as well.</p> <p>Have you looked at this page yet?</p> <p><a href="http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/" rel="nofollow">http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/</a></p> <p><strong>Update:</strong></p> <p>Can you post the model for a? is a.picture an image field? If so, then you don't need to put the MEDIA_URL in your img src, since it is already an absolute url and it should include the MEDIA_URL already. try removing that and see if it works.</p> <pre><code>&lt;img src='{{a.picture.url}}' /&gt; </code></pre> <p>For more info see this page.</p> <p><a href="http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/models/fields/#django.db.models.FileField.storage" rel="nofollow">http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/models/fields/#django.db.models.FileField.storage</a></p>