I spent almost 5 hours. When I enabled friendly urls, my images didn't appear. I migrated from my live domain to localhost actually. The localhost version didn't show images.
- I did this .htaccess file deletion
- I reset all file and folder permissions
- I enabled mod_rewrite under apache
- Reindexed
- Created thumbnails
- Removed cache
- I set AllowOverride All under /etc/apache/sites-available/default.conf
Finally now I discovered I had to set AllowOverride All also under apache.conf file or depending on your system, it can be httpd.conf file
Since my presta shop was under folder called "myshopsite", I created a new entry in this file /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
as
<Directory /var/www/html/myshopsite> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory>
and finally
sudo apache2ctl restart
Voila!!!!