So, I wanted to avoid the cache to see images I'm uploading to this website I'm working on, which I access through localhost.
I hit a handy solution pretty quick:
Attaching to the end of image's path ?random= and a random number generated by Math.floor(). All this with the help of a script.
The HTML showed in the browser:
<img class="gallery_img" src="./uploads/4.jpg?random=172">
Awesome, it works beautifully.
Now, the thing that has been hard to find is an explanation of why and how this actually works.
I mean, 1) how the browser still finds the image in the server with this new path?
Or asked the other way around, 2) how the server handles this ?random=172 attachment and delivers the image asked before that?
If somebody could point me to the right direction I would be grateful.
Solution:
Have a look on what are query parameters.
And if you are dealing with the problem of avoiding the cache, have a look here:
That is not part of the path, that is a query parameter.
And most of the times the server of images does not care about query parameters, at least not a literally random one, maybe it would support a query parameter called width or size and dynamically generate an image of the correct size. But random is most likely simply discarded and the image is served normally.