I recently tried to load a background picture into blender using View - Background Pic and it didn’t work. I could load the image, but nothing would show up. I tried it in an older version of blender and it worked fine. Anyone else had this problem? What should I do?
Do you have an ATI card?
I notice sometimes that this problem occurs on my computer (I have an ATI). Restarting Blender seems to help, and sometimes reloading the file helps (after restarting).
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I have an nVidia GeForce 6800 GT. Everything else works fine in Blender.
Did you make sure that you’re not in perspective? I would also check the options in the background image, if you set the blend to 1 you can’t see anything. As well, if the picture is too small, you would have to increase the size. (Probably stuff that you’ve tried already, but who knows? 
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Yea, all been checked. I just UV mapped the picture to a plane and that seemed to solve the problem for now. Thanks for the help anyway. 
Just figured this out myself after a bunch of forum cruising and repeated frustrated attempts to get my Background Image to show up.
Trying to be as definitive as possible, it looks like there are 3 parameters you must get in shape simultaneously in order to be able to see your Background Image, which can be extremely confusing if you’re trying to troubleshoot why you can’t see your image in the first place and you don’t realize that one of these 3 interdependent parameters is messing up your whole gig. The 3 parameters I’ve figured out are:
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You must be in one of the “flat-on” views, i.e. Side, Front or Top. Camera or User view will not allow your Background Image to be visible. It’s worth mentioning here (just so all the info’s in one place) that if you use CTRL-middle button to rotate from your Side, Front or Top view, you are now out of the correct view and your image disappears again.
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You view must also be set to Orthographic (parallel) and not Perspective.
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If you get both of your view settings set correctly but the Blend slider in your transparent Background Image box is set all the way up to 1, your Background Image will be invisible. Set your Blend slider to 0 to see your image at 100% opacity.
This was really anti-intuitive to my way of thinking as I tended to think of the 0-1 Blend slider number as “Opacity” - meaning I expected to set the “Opacity” to 1 (to me, 1 = “On” or “Yes”) and see the image. Instead, it pays to think of “Blend” as “Transparency”.
(PS - I’m not criticizing, I’m just saying on this point my brain and Blender were at odds)
Some of these parameters have been covered already, in this thread even, I just wanted to make sure that everything was listed completely in one post since I was confused enough by this to be stopped for hours while I tried to figure it out.
you can see the background image in the camera view