Creating temporary image-copies during session

Heinz

Hi there,

I need to copy images to a temporary folder, which are displayed afterwards in a form.

The idea behind that is, that users could delete/upload images during a session for editing page content. As a backup-function they should work on temporary copies only...

is it possible to create Session-file-variables?

is it possible to make sure those temporary images are deleted after the session has been destroyed (by the garbage-collector)?

...or is it just enough to write the files into C:\windows\temp which should be cleaned up by the system itself...and just skip the session-handlers for that..

Thanks in advance...

coreyp_1

Try and see! 😃

In theory, you should be able to store a pic as a session variable (as far as I know), but it would have to be accessed by a separate script in order to display it on a page using that same session.

There could be serious memory issues, though, depending on what your host will permit. Sometimes they are stingy on what resources they will allocate, and for how long. It's just something to be wary of.

It would be a tribute to programming prowess to use sessions, but for practicality, it may be better to store them in some temp directory and clean it out periodically.

I'd be interested to know what method you use, and how it all comes out.

Good luck!

Heinz

Hmm... I thought about copying the whole image-string into a $_SESSION-Variable, and display it directly through the script via imagecreate/imagejpeg.

I will try that, but I don't think that would be the final solution because of the unproper use of memory.

Of course I could try to write own session-handlers and put the images into a database which should work pretty fast.

Anyway, my favourite solution would be to create a temporary folder named with the session_id.

My only problem is, how to get rid of the folder after the session is destroyed. . .

... I fear the only way is to write own session-handlers, again.

If anyone knows a simpler method, please tell me.

steadyguy

You might consider using the GD Library. It allows you to create new graphics, and modify existing ones, and you could keep track of your various variables (size, source file, etc) as session variables. Keeps down the memory used for sessions, but gives you flexible, 'sesssionable' graphics, too.