I’m working on a Spring Boot project with Thymeleaf, and I’m encountering an issue when trying to display images that are stored outside the resources/ folder of my project. The images are located in an external directory, but I need my project to remain portable, meaning it should work across multiple operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux). Context:

The project uses Spring Boot and Thymeleaf to display images.

The images are currently stored in an external directory outside the project (e.g., on the user's local file system).

The goal is to make this work in a way that is cross-platform (i.e., it should work on different machines without specific configuration for each environment).

Problem:

I need a way to serve these external images in the project while ensuring that the solution is portable across different environments. Ideally, I would like a solution that:

Allows accessing images stored outside the project directory (e.g., outside src/main/resources).

Works on multiple operating systems without needing specific configurations for each.

Uses Thymeleaf to display the images in the front-end.

Attempts:

I tried configuring spring.resources.static-locations to point to an absolute path (file:/path/to/external/images), but this approach is not portable across machines.

I also explored using classpath: or relative paths, but I’m not sure how to configure Spring Boot to serve files from outside the project structure in a cross-platform way.

Does anyone know how I can achieve this? Any suggestions or approaches to handle this issue effectively across different operating systems would be appreciated!