The Top Stories Slider, Blog Posts & Pages and the News Boxes macros generate an excerpt from the first couple of lines of a blog post like the original Confluence Blog Posts macro. Unless the actual Excerpt macro is used, then the content from the Excerpt macro body will be used instead. Due to a bug that was introduced in Confluence 5.4, images and links are not rendered properly in those macros. Instead of the actual image, the name of the image is shown and with links, instead of the rendered clickable link, the URL of the link is displayed.
This Confluence bug has been already reported to Atlassian, see CONF-34197 - Blog Posts Macro renders URLs as text when content = excerpts and post contains no excerpt.
Workaround
Instead of letting Confluence generate the excerpt you can use the Excerpt macro to define an excerpt including links and pictures.
Related articles
Add a news/blog post to the news list ("Blog post & pages" macro)
