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Asked: 2026-05-28T19:20:52+00:00

I’m trying to wrap my head around what approach I should use to force

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I’m trying to wrap my head around what approach I should use to force CDN refreshes of user profile photos on a website where CloudFront is the CDN serving the profile photos, and S3 is the underlying file store.

I need to ensure that user profile photos are up to date as soon as a user updates their profile photos. I see three options that I can do to update profile photos and ensure that website users get the latest image as soon as profile photos are revised. Of these approaches, is one better than the other in terms of ensuring fresh content and maximum long term cost effectiveness? Are there better approaches to ensuring fresh content and maximum long term cost effectiveness?

  1. Issue one S3 put object request to save the file with its original file name, and issue one Amazon CloudFront invalidation request. Amazon CloudFront allows up to 1000 free invalidation requests per month which seems a bit on the low side
  2. Issue one S3delete object request to delete the original photos, then one S3 put object request to save the new photo with a unique, new photo file name. This would be two S3 requests per file update, and would not require a CloudFront CDN invalidation request. CloudFront would then serve the latest files as soon as they were updated, providing image URLs were automatically set to the new file names
  3. Issue one S3 put object request to save the file with its original file name, and then client side append a version code to the CDN URLs (i.e. /img/profilepic.jpg?x=timestamp) or something along that line. I’m not sure how effective this strategy is in terms of invalidating cached CloudFront objects

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    CloudFront invalidation can take a while to kick in and is recomendded as a last resort to remove content that must be removed (like a copyright infringement).

    The best approach is you versioned URLs. For profile images I would use an unique ID (such as a GUID). Whenever a user uploads a new photo replace that URL (and delete the old photo if you wish).

    When you update your DB with the new ID of the user profile photo CloudFront will pull the new image and the change will be immediate.

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