Apparantely I deleted 2 Important Images... Now received 5,000 404 Errors past month

A month ago I was trying to reduce site speed so i deleted my pictures in order to resize them smaller and reupload them. Apparantely i just realized those pictures must have been ranking very high as I have 3,400 404 errors for the first image and nearly 2,500 for the second image.

How can I stop these 404 crawl errors, is it necessary I just do a 301 redirect from the old image URL to the resized one?

Thx

301 sounds about right, that's your only option. I've had the same issue in the past, just 301 it to the new image so its not broken for your visitors.

I did something similar a few months back and am still getting boatloads of 404 image traffic. Apparently there were quite a few people snagging the RSS feeds from a site of mine and hotlinking the hell out of everything.

I tried all sorts of ways to stop it but like directaxcess said, 301'ing the image to another image is probably your best bet.

I have done plenty of 301's in the past but for some reason it's not working for the image. Nothing specific i have to do to 301 an image URl is there?

Just realized it's not 301 redirecting because there are special characters (%) in the URL. anyone know how to 301 a URL with special characters?