If your website has so many small images you better keep bundle them into CSS sprite files. I am just scratching my head trying to figure out a best to manage and version control these generated sprite images. Let's say you had a small delete button and you already bundled it in a sprite file. Now you got a better image for the same button and you want to update your sprite. What practices do you follow to get this done? Ways I can think of are..
Use Photoshop to edit the whole sprite image and replace the previous button with the new one.
Regenerate your sprite with the tool you use to generate them.
What do you follow as a best practice? Anything other than the above two ways?
Just because you change the image does not mean your users will also see the changes due to caching. To get around it, you would need to add a version querystring after the image to force a new version from the cache.