File Select Tries to Load Nonexistent Image File

My brother's having an issue where when he tries to access file select, either through saving or loading, instead he gets an error message saying it can't load an image (an old character portrait image which doesn't exist anymore). We're both kinda noobs with RPG Maker, but I figure I just have to find where it's trying to access that directory and change it to something valid, but I don't know how. I've tried looking at the character settings for the character in question, and the portrait image is set to (none).

Any help is much appreciated.

Are you talking about in the editor, or trying to save/load a game when playing?

If it is a party member, what's in the database now has no bearing on what it tries to load. When you first started that game, and the actor joined the party, their settings (including images) became part of the save file. When you open that window, it uses the image on the actor at the time that save file was made, not the image on the actor in the database now.

Delete your old save files and it won't try to load the old image anymore.

If, as Shaz mentioned play a game from start, then you should check the map you are about to land for any events that change portrait of a character. Many people miss event commands that refer to a missing file.
Check also common events in the database.

If you got an old save file, well... the situation is as @Shaz told you.

I can't really think of anything else to fix this properly.

(The crude way is to create a duplicate file of an existing portrait with the missing file name but don't do that)

make an empty file with the same name as returned by the error, in the correct folder.
load up the game, then save again so it takes your current state of files, then go in the editor and add an event changing that character's sprite to something else.
that should get rid of the reference to the missing file.
if simply changing the image doesn't solve the problem, purge the party object and remove everyone, then save again

you have to use the game proper to make the change, not the editor.

Thanks for your help! It was just that some save files were trying to reference the old image file. We removed the save files from the save folder and it worked just fine.

I was considering the case where you would want to recover the save game, but...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
eh... whatever

Fair enough, our save files weren't really needed though but I'll keep that in mind if we need to keep the save file