How to force a web browser NOT to cache images

Question

Background

I am writing and using a very simple CGI-based (Perl) content management tool for two pro-bono websites. It provides the website administrator with HTML

Answer 1

You may write a proxy script for serving images - that's a bit more of work though. Something likes this:

HTML:

Script:

// PHP
if( isset( $_GET['img'] ) && is_file( IMG_PATH . $_GET['img'] ) ) {

  // read contents
  $f = open( IMG_PATH . $_GET['img'] );
  $img = $f.read();
  $f.close();

  // no-cache headers - complete set
  // these copied from [php.net/header][1], tested myself - works
  header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); // Some time in the past
  header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT"); 
  header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate"); 
  header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false); 
  header("Pragma: no-cache"); 

  // image related headers
  header('Accept-Ranges: bytes');
  header('Content-Length: '.strlen( $img )); // How many bytes we're going to send
  header('Content-Type: image/jpeg'); // or image/png etc

  // actual image
  echo $img;
  exit();
}

Actually either no-cache headers or random number at image src should be sufficient, but since we want to be bullet proof..