Image upload question

[JoeBrewer]

I am writing a basic image gallery that lets users upload there own images.

At the moment the images are stored in a mysql database, but I want to change this so that they are stored in the file system, but have no idea where the best place to put them is, or how to protect the directory.

I have access to directories below the document root, so I could move the files here, but I'm not sure how would access them when I want to display them.

Any help would be appriciated.

Brew

[devinemke]

you could hide the whole thing behind htaccess auth (if you are using Apache) or you could store the files above the doc root and make a temp copy of each file that needs to be displayed.