I am working on an angular js app, andhavecome across a similar issue. What i did was display the image from the db, then created a button to remove or keep the current image. If the user decided to keep the current image, i changed the ng-submit attribute to another function whihc doesnt require image validation, and updated the record in the db without touching the original image path name. The remove image function also changed the ng-submit attribute value back to a function that submits the form and includes image validation and upload. Also a bit of javascript to slide the into view to upload a new image.