Displaying images without showing actual image file name?

sharapov

Let's say I have a database that has an "ID" field and "Image" field. When I display an image on the page instead of showing <img src="myimage.jpg"> I want to show something like <img src="image.php?ID=1234>, where "1234" corresponds to the id of an image in the database. How can I do it?

toma42

image.php must echo the correct headers for a jpg file before echoing out the data stored in the database. Not a hard script...hope this gets you underway.

See the documentation comments for header() for examples of its use.

Mordecai

What you're going to need is to open the image and echo out the contents. Assuming that you have the URL to every image stored in the database as well (lets call the image url $imageurl), this will be a fairly easy script.
$im = imagecreatefromjpeg($imageurl);
imagejpeg($im,100); // 100% quality
destroyimage($im);

That will only work if you have GD installed, though. If you don't, you'll have to use the file functions.

header("Content-type: image/jpeg");
$fp = fopen($imageurl,"r");
$contents = fread($fp,filesize($imageurl));
fclose($fp);
echo($contents);

Hope this helps.

toma42

The GD method is very cpu intensive. I recommend a slightly changed mordecai example:

header("Content-type: image/jpeg");
$fp = fopen($imageurl,"r");
echo fread($fp,filesize($imageurl));
fclose($fp);

Or, cleaner but possibly slower:
echo implode('', file($imageurl));

sharapov

toma42 and Mordecai,

Thank you for your response. With your help I've figured out the solution for my problem. However, I have another question.

How can I prevent user simply to look at the source of the loaded page and then get the image by typing www.mysite.com/image.php?id=1234 in the browser?

SicChild

Originally posted by sharapov
toma42 and Mordecai,

Thank you for your response. With your help I've figured out the solution for my problem. However, I have another question.

How can I prevent user simply to look at the source of the loaded page and then get the image by typing www.mysite.com/image.php?id=1234 in the browser?

Get the image how? You'll never be able to steal people from stealing your images. However, www.mysite.com/image.php?id=1234 should act as an image, just as if you typed www.mysite.com/image1234.jpg into the browser. So, they'll be able to get www.mysite.com/image.php?id=1234, but never the actual URL of the image on your server. Correct me if I'm wrong guys.

sharapov

Well, can I prevent the users from typing www.mysite.com/image.php?id=1234 directly in the browser. In other words even if they type it can I make the script not to reveal the image?

SicChild

check the referer. if there's no referer, then they typed it in probably.