Change to URL and ReWrite rule not working - .htaccess

Question

Have recently been making use off the htaccess file to create rewrites.
Everything works well, but have made a recent change to include a category name followed by the product, like this:
http://localhost/Limestone_Tiles/products/Antalya_Blanc.html
It just used to be:
http://localhost/products/Antalya_Blanc.html
When everything worked ok. The rewrite rules where as follows:
RewriteRule ^products/(.*).html$ product_details.php?&furl=$1 [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^products/images/(.*)$ images/$1
RewriteRule ^products/picture_upload/(.*)$ picture_upload/$1
RewriteRule ^products/thumbnail.php(.*)$ thumbnail.php$1
So to accommodate the new change I have changed the rewrite rules as follows:
RewriteRule ^(.*)/products/(.*).html$ product_details.php?&furl=$1 [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/products/images/(.*)$ images/$1
RewriteRule ^(.*)/products/picture_upload/(.*)$ picture_upload/$1
RewriteRule ^(.*)/products/thumbnail.php(.*)$ thumbnail.php$1
Now this kind of works because
http://localhost/Limestone_Tiles/products/Antalya_Blanc.html
Will load, but none of the images do - which does not make sense to me when the page does? Why don't the images?
If I change the rewrite rule to:
RewriteRule ^Limestone_Tiles/products/images/(.*)$ images/$1
The images will load for that particular category!
If I put the image url into the browser:
http://localhost/Limestone_Tiles/products/images/face.png
I get the follow message:
The requested URL /images/Limestone_Tiles was not found on this server.
Which is also odd as /images/Limestone_Tiles isn't the Url I have just pasted into the address bar.
Perhaps my rewrite rule is incorrect still?
Many thanks for your help in advance.

Answer 1

This is because your rules have groupings that backreference the first grouped match and not the match you really want. Say, given this rule:
RewriteRule ^(.*)/products/(.*).html$ product_details.php?&furl=$1 [NC,L]
And this URL:
http://localhost/Limestone_Tiles/products/Antalya_Blanc.html
The rewritten URI will be: /product_details.php?&furl=Limestone_Tiles
Whereas before, with the older rule, it would have been rewritten to: /product_details.php?&furl=Antalya_Blanc
If that's your intended behavior, then that's fine, except it's breaking the image rule:
RewriteRule ^(.*)/products/images/(.*)$ images/$1
The $1 backreferences the first grouped match (.*), the one before /products/images/, and not the actual image. It needs to be changed to:
RewriteRule ^(.*)/products/images/(.*)$ images/$2
You're probably better off changing the HTML content and fixing this image stuff there as opposed to creating a rewrite rule to try to correct it. You could try adding this to the header of your pages:
<base href="/">