Hi everyone,

I'm developing an ad marketplace where I generate PNG previews of Blade templates using an external API (HCTI). Everything works perfectly on localhost, but I'm facing a critical issue on my live server (Shared Hosting).

The Problem:

Images uploaded via Livewire (stored in storage/app/public/ads/content) are not appearing in the Blade templates on the live site.

Oddly, .AVIF images work in the generated previews, but .JPG and .PNG do not.

Standard asset('storage/...') calls return broken links across the entire site.

What I've Tried:

I attempted to run php artisan storage:link, but my host restricts the symlink() PHP function, resulting in a 500 Server Error.

I've updated my .env APP_URL to the live domain and cleared the config cache.

I tried converting images to Base64 strings before sending them to the API. This fixed the preview generation for some files, but the rest of the website is still "image-blind".

Current Theory: > It seems to be a Base Path issue where the live server cannot resolve the virtual public/storage directory because the physical symlink is missing/blocked.

Has anyone found a robust way to serve storage files on shared hosting without a symlink, or a way to force Laravel's asset() helper to point to the actual physical path?

Thanks in advance!