Retrying an image at a variant that exists

Some sources publish several renditions of the same picture under predictable URLs, and only some of them are guaranteed. Point at the high-resolution one and a minority of records answer with a 404. The image itself degrades gracefully — a placeholder appears. Everything derived from the image does not.

// adapted — the URL is composition state, keyed on the record, and both the request and its
// cache key read that same state
var imageUrl by remember(record.id) { mutableStateOf(record.imageUrl) }

AsyncImage(
    model = ImageRequest.Builder(LocalPlatformContext.current)
        .data(imageUrl)
        .diskCachePolicy(CachePolicy.ENABLED)
        .diskCacheKey(imageUrl + "BIGGER")     // follows the mutation, not the record
        .crossfade(550)
        .build(),
    contentDescription = "",
    onSuccess = { actions.onArtworkBitmap(it.result.image.toImageBitmap()) },
    onError = {
        val fallback = imageUrl?.replace(HI_RES_VARIANT, GUARANTEED_VARIANT)
        if (fallback != null && fallback != imageUrl) imageUrl = fallback
    },
    …
)

Traps

The expensive failure is invisible, and it is not the image. A missing image shows a placeholder — annoying, obvious, low stakes. But onSuccess is also where the bitmap is handed to palette extraction, and the palette is what colours the page: background, accents, sometimes an entire generated scheme. When the request fails, that callback never fires, the palette never generates, and the page silently keeps its neutral fallback. Nobody files a bug titled "the background is the wrong colour for this one record" — it just looks slightly dead, for some records and not others. That is the actual reason to add the retry.

The cache key must read the mutated URL, not the record. Key the request off record.imageUrl and the retry loads the good variant while writing it into the cache entry for the dead one. Next visit reads that entry back for a URL that 404s, or re-fetches every time depending on which layer you keyed. .data(x) and .diskCacheKey(x…) must name the same state — check both lines together, because the bug only exists in the mismatch and each line looks fine on its own.

remember(key) — never a bare remember. Without the record key, the first record that falls back leaves its substituted URL sitting in state, and the next record renders with the previous record's URL until something else recomposes. With the key, the state resets exactly when the record changes, which is also the only moment the initial value is meaningful.

The swap must be a no-op the second time. onError fires again when the fallback itself fails. The guard is that applying the same rewrite to an already-rewritten URL yields the identical string — so fallback != imageUrl is false and nothing is written. Get that wrong (a rewrite that keeps producing a different string, or an unconditional assignment) and you have an infinite request/error/request cycle burning the network. Prefer a rewrite that is idempotent by construction over a var retried by remember flag, which is one more thing to reset per record.

A rewrite that does not match is a free no-op, and that is the point. Records whose images come from a different host never contain the variant token, so replace returns the identical string, the guard is false, and nothing happens. No host sniffing, no when, no per-source branch — one line that is inert everywhere except where it is needed.

Keep the image composed when it is hidden, or you lose the callback with it. Where the artwork is covered by a video or a full-bleed animation, the temptation is if (!covered) { AsyncImage(…) }. That removes the node, so the load is cancelled and onSuccess never fires — and the palette that the covering layer's own colours depend on never resolves. Hide it with alpha(0f) and let it keep its layout slot and its request.

The retry belongs in composition, not in the repository. Nothing below the UI knows the request failed; the image loader's error callback is where that fact exists. Pushing a "verify this URL" probe into the data layer costs an extra network round-trip per record for a problem that resolves itself in the loader, and the fix would still have to reach the cache key that lives up here.

A palette that is never fed and a palette that is still loading look the same on screen. If the page is black or neutral, decide which one you have before adding a retry — see palette-state-parks-on-loading for the extraction state that reports no colour while it works, and artwork-palette-theming for choosing the swatch once it does arrive. Where the image seeds a whole generated scheme rather than one background, the blast radius is every token on the page: artwork-seeded-dynamic-scheme covers what falls back to the app seed when this callback is missed.

Verifying it

# 1. every retry that rewrites a URL in onError
grep -rn --include='*.kt' -A3 'onError = {' . | grep -E 'replace\('

# 2. for each of those requests, the data() and the key that must read the same state
grep -rn --include='*.kt' -B14 'onError = {' . | grep -E '\.data\(|diskCacheKey\('

# 3. images wrapped in a conditional — the branch going false cancels the load, so any
#    callback on them never fires. The window has to be wide: the guard that matters is rarely
#    adjacent, and a two-line window returns a tidy list with every real instance missing from it
grep -rn --include='*.kt' -B30 'AsyncImage(' . | grep -E 'if \(.*\) \{$'

1. → observed: the retry sites, each computing the fallback with a plain replace of one variant token and each guarded by fallback != <state>. An unguarded assignment here is the loop.
2. → observed: for every retry site, .data(<state>) and .diskCacheKey(<state> + …) name the same mutable value. A .data(mutableState) sitting above a .diskCacheKey(record.field) is the mismatch described above, and it will not show up until the second visit to that record.
3. → observed: a few dozen hits, most of them decorative images or plain null guards — and, at the far end of the window, the guards that really do wrap a palette-feeding image, with a comment block, a remember and sometimes a Box sitting between them and their AsyncImage(. That distance is the point: those are the hits to open. A conditional around a decorative image is fine, while the one whose success feeds the palette must stay composed and be hidden with alpha(0f). Read the block under each hit; the grep finds candidates, not verdicts.

Then, by hand: find a record whose high-resolution variant is missing and open it twice. First visit — the image resolves after a brief placeholder and the page picks up its colour. Second visit — no network request for it at all (the fallback is cached under its own key), and the colour appears immediately. Watch the network log rather than the screen: a retry loop is quiet on screen and loud there.