need help using PHP to display images

[earlparkerii]

I'm going to be creating an online catalog with quite a number of images on each page. Rather than create page after page with HTML (horribly time consuming- I've had to do it before), I'd like to use PHP to create pages on the fly.

I'd like to set things up to where when a user clicks on a link, say "switches", all of the switch images are retrieved from the server and appear on the page; when "terminal" is clicked on all the terminal images are retrieved and appear on the page, etc.

Someone please tell me that there is a fairly simple way to use PHP to retrieve an image (GIF) from a server and display it on a page- I'll be a happy camper.

BTW, the HTML part is no problem, just the PHP end.

[van__]

Yes, it can be done.
No... I can't give you an example... too time consuming, and I'm not in the mood to write a full script for free.

what you can do is either store the iomages in a database and store each iomage in there, you can have a descriptor field say "type" which can be set to say "switches"

Then query like:
$sql = "SELECT * FROM myImageTable Where type = 'switches'";

or you can use filesystem functions to open a directory and read it's contents and form links that way.

Either way you choose to do it, there's plenty of info in the manual.

[Anon]

Helpful hint: don't store the images in the database, only their filenames - and store the image files in a directory.

Then when you want to display $product['image'] (for the sake of argument)

<img src="<?php echo $product['image']?>">

It's a lot messier and a lot less efficient if you store the images themselves in the database.

[earlparkerii]

Thanks to both of you for taking the time to respond- now I have a direction to go in.

BTW, Van, I wasn't looking for a script, just an idea of which way to proceed.