If you keep all your gaming media files in one central location for all your projects, another way of doing it that doesn't involve lengthy pathnames in every filename loaded:
SetCurrentDirectory("C:\\Library\\GamingMedia");
dbLoadImage("Images\\block1.png", 1, 1);
If DarkGDK tries to load a (media) file that it can't find, it keeps quiet about it. However if you're using Spary's collision, it will give a generic runtime error for non-existent objects (among other things). You can tell if a load was successful or not by checking that the image (or object or whatever media you're loading) exists after loading it. For example:
int success = dbImageExist(imageNumber); // 0 = failed, 1 = succeeded
I always insert a line like that after a load in a debug session if I need to track something like that down.