Rails 3.1: alias /images to /assets directory
You can do this in nginx
location /images { alias /usr/share/rails_app/public/assets/images;}Though I think the bigger problem will be when you run
rake assets:precompileIt will add a md5hash string to your images. This hash string is added to force browsers to download changed images, so it doesn't use the browser cache. Since the names of the images will be different. It might make more sense to host the old images in a static directory with nginx.