how to clear or replace a cached image

Question

I know there are many ways to prevent image caching (such as via META tags), as well as a few nice tricks to ensure that the current version of an image is shown with every

Answer 1

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme

Notice that you can provide a unique username:password@ combo as a prefix to the domain portion of the uri. In my experimentation, I've found that inclusion of this with a fake ID (or password I assume) results in the treatment of the resource as unique - thus breaking the caching as you desire.

Simply use a timestamp as the username and as far as I can tell the server ignores this portion of the uri as long as authentication is not turned on.

Btw - I also couldn't use the tricks above with a google map marker icon caching problem I was having where the ?param=timestamp trick worked, but caused issues with disappearing overlays. Never could figure out why this was happening, but so far so good using this method. What I'm unsure of, is if passing fake credentials will have any adverse server performance affects. If anyone knows I'd be interested to know as I'm not yet in high volume production.

Please report back your results.