Best way to display default image if specified image file is not found?

Question

I\'ve got your average e-Commerce app, I store ITEM_IMAGE_NAME in the database, and sometimes managers MISSPELL the image name.

To avoid \"missing images\" (red X in IE

Answer 1

I think I would find a way to make the data consistent rather than allowing users to enter inconsistent data. Perhaps your management app could allow the manager to select an existing image or upload a new one, then set the name of the image based on this input so that you'd be assured that the image will exist. Only remove an image when all references to it have been removed from the database. Restrict the interaction with the data to your app so that people can't make those sorts of mistakes.

Another way to handle this would be to have a handler (or a controller in ASP.NET MVC) that does the image lookup based on id and returns the image data. Coupled with caching this could be very efficient and would allow you to do image replacement as well.