I have a web application, where i am storing all the images in a folder which is totally outside WEB-INF folder or webroot folder. When the jsp to display the image is called, before displaying it, i am moving the concerned image files to WEB-INF/images folder and then setting the path in the html IMG tag. My question is
Is this good design? Also even though the image is moved to WEB-INF/images folder, the page does not display the image always, it displays sometimes and sometimes it doesnt. I dont know how to debug this problem.
I am using springs and spring security.
This is not a very good design. In many cases, server will cache web application data so if the image was not there it will never find out that it appeared in place. That's, probably, causing the inconsistency that you observe as there may be other factors affecting caching.
The right choice would be to provide a servlet that serves your image data upon request from the file.