Display default image when missing file in nginx

Question

We have various pictures associated with items on our site but not for all of them. To this end we would like to display the contents of 'blank.jpg' if a given image is not found.

To this end we have the nginx config like this

location /static/images/ {
    root /blah_blah_blah/pictures/;
    error_page 404 blank.jpg;
    break;
}

The problems with this is that this takes /static/images/fred.jpg and redirects to /static/images/blank.jpg when what we want is to simply display the contents of blank.jpg whilst keeping the /static/images/fred.jpg url

It also seems to go into a redirect loop occasionally.

Answer 1

Not sure if you still need it 10 month later but this looks like what you were looking for: https://serverfault.com/questions/562269/redirect-missing-images-in-a-specific-directory