title: Magento original image resize only shows placeholder image
body: <p>I am trying to get this piece of code to work in magento 1.7.0...</p>
  
  <p>it only displays the magento placeholder image... </p>
  
  <p>if i change "image" to "small_image" it works fine </p>
  
  <p>everything is set up in the back end the radio buttons are selected for the product images... I have cleared the cache also... </p>
  
  <p>this is happening in the list.phtml file ... </p>
  
  <p>can someone kind enough tell me what i am doing wrong or WHY its not working... i have been searching all over i found one solution after 3 days of searching and it didn't work.... </p>
  
  <p>$_item is not defined so a i get a call to a non object error...</p>
  
  <p>here's a link to the answere </p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11995206/get-base-product-image-in-magento">Get base product image in Magento</a></p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php echo $this-&gt;helper('catalog/image')-&gt;init($_product, 'image')-&gt;resize(171, 259);
  </code></pre>