ppicture upload

vinny199

Hi,

I'm confused with the principle of retrieving uploaded pictures.

I have got the script working for users to upload pictures into a folder I called "uploads"

The idea being that once the pictures are uploaded, they would display automatically on the page.

question is, what do I need to do for this to happen:

1/ User use the browse button to select a file on his computer
2/ he clicks upload and the picture is uploaded to the upload folder "as is", with whatever name the picture file was given by the user, and whatever extention type (jpeg, gif etc"
3 /??? that picture is displayed on website, but how?

How can a page display that uploaded file.

I guess there is a dynamic way to do that, maybe store a path to the file in a table to then retrieve it? but how do you pick up the name of the file when you don't know what it is called on the users computer in the first place?

I can't see how this is done.

In fact, posting this thread I just realized this exact function is used in this forum. you can upload a picture that athen automatically displays with your message. the display part is what I don't understand

Can you help?

thanks,

Vinny

coppercoins

I would take the approach that you are going to have them upload to "uploads". After that, you would need to check the integrity of the image (as an image) before allowing it to be written anywhere else on the server - it could be a virus. My first thought in that respect is to run getimagesize() on it and see if it returns good values...if so, it's an image. If not, delete it.

Secondary to that, I would think it would be easy enough to name a path you want to save the image in, i.e., "WEB_ROOT/username/" and use one of the write functions to do that.

From a different location, now that you know you have the image stored in a specific place, you simply call on it with an HTML img tag and you're basically done.

This is the thought mapped out in theory, coding it would be more difficult.

vinny199

yes, I undersrand the principle I think, but the part I don't understan is what do you write in the <img src= ???

because, yes, i do know the path /uploads/ but I can't know in advance the name of the picture uploaded by user and even if I rename the file, it could be a .gif, jpeg, png etc.

this is what I don't understand.

How do you retrieve an uploaded pic?

laserlight

I guess there is a dynamic way to do that, maybe store a path to the file in a table to then retrieve it? but how do you pick up the name of the file when you don't know what it is called on the users computer in the first place?

Then your database table must link that row to the user.

vinny199

sorry,

don't quite understand.

say a user uploads 5 pics and you want to display the 5 uploaded pics.

what is the row / user connection here?

Can you explain further?

Thanks.

laserlight

the filename-user relationship is a many-one relationship.

it could be implemented as each filename row having a field for the corresponding user id.

You probably need to read up some of phpbuilder's articles on databases, e.g.
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/index.php3?cat=1&subcat=28