Why does my deleted image still appear after I load a new image?

Webonizer users often delete an image from a document and then load a new image. After doing so, they often see their old image that they had deleted instead of the new image.

This is not a problem of Webonizer, and it is simply a caching issue! While you may see the old image, the new image is really on the server. Anyone viewing the image for the first time will see the new and proper image. Read on to understand what is happening.

In order to optimize web traffic, web browsers have a function called caching. A web browser’s cache is a collection of files (images, JavaScript files, style sheets and entire web pages) that get stored on your computer. This makes browsing a website quicker because your browser will see that you already have a certain file when you visit a page and decide to use the file cached on your computer rather than download the file again.

This affects image editing on Webonizer sites because Webonizer has a convention of naming images that is standardized; when you add an image, it gets renamed on the server in a specific format—and when it gets deleted, the name will be reused when a new image is loaded to that document.

After deleting an image, and reloading a new one in its place, your browser “thinks” that the old image is what it should be looking at—so it displays the cache of the old image instead of loading the new image. This issue is temporary, and it only affects visitors who have very recently visited your page.

This issue is rectified by refreshing the page or clearing your cache. Refreshing the page is as simple as hitting the refresh button* on a page that displays the image (in Internet Explorer that is F5).

Even after you refresh the page you may find that different pages using the recycled image names are showing different results! That is because Webonizer actually makes several copies of each image you load to display in different areas of the website—JPEGs get up to three files made, one as a thumbnail, one as a medium/full size and another as full-size (the medium-full size files exist depending on the original image dimensions when loaded).

Because of this, you may have to refresh more than one page to load all the new versions into your web browser cache.

*Note that you should not hit the refresh button on a page you just submitted a form to. Doing so will cause the information you just sent to get re-sent to the server—possibly loading more copies of images, wasting server resources and needlessly causing the server to update a database.

More in the File and Media Handling Series

Media Handling
Image and Media File Information
Why does my image not appear on the Front Page, Slideshow, Etc?
Why does my deleted image still appear after I load a new image?
Why are some of my images clickable (to enlarge) and others are not?