Retrieving Images in Database

reflash

I've successfully uploaded images to a database (I think - [BLOB - 22.8 KB]), but I have no idea of how to pull them back out and display them. Here's what I tried:

	print "\n\n\t<tr>\n\t\t<td width=\"48%\" align=\"right\"><h2>{$row['title']}</h2>{$row['text']}</td>\n\t\t";
	print "<td width=\"4%\">&nbsp</td>\n\t\t";
	print "<td width=\"*\" align=\"left\" valign=\"mid\"><img src=\"{$row['image']}\" /></td>\n\t</tr>";

All I get is a page full of strange symbols. Does anybody have any ideas?

leatherback

Hi,

Yes, an image is an independent object, so it is not part of the HTML source. the HTML source only refers to the location the image can be found when the page is loaded. So you need to have a seperate page, say image.php, which spits out the image stream:

"select * from table where id=$id";

echo $row[image];

In the page displaying you use that page as a source of the image:

reflash

Thanks, leatherback, for the reply - I appreciate it. I have one question: The code that I included above is part of a while loop, because I want to show multiple images on the page.

I'm selecting the images by a page designator that is set when the image is uploaded, so the select query looks like this:

$query="SELECT * FROM $table WHERE page = 'tools'";

This will give me an array of all fields in the record that I can then use on image.php, but how do I then specify how to echo them out? I can't use an incremented for loop because the id numbers won't necessarily stay at constant increments as images are added and deleted (the client will be adding and deleting items fairly often). Any ideas on this?

Thanks again for your help!

leatherback

hm..
You mean.. How to loop through your result? I have found I am writing the same answers over and over again. Please have a look at http://www.bio-vision.nl/coding/select_from.php and let us knows whether this answers your questions.

reflash

I know how to loop through the results on a single page. My question is where to put the loop to get multiple images from the database on the dual page solution that you suggested above. I think that I would need to put it around the <img src="image.php?page='tools'" />, no?

leatherback

THis:
<img src="image.php?page='tools'" />

Is not what i wrote, now is it?

I wrote:
<img src="image.php?id=$id" />

Which means that you can call the image.php script, and pass the ID of the image you want to show to the script. So what you are looping through your results array, you can spit out that line in every loop, and add the ID for the image of that row at the end.

Hope it is a bit clearer now. (I get lost in my mind sometimes, and forget people are not there with me).

Weedpacket

One of the ways this could be simplified would be to store the images in the file system, and then store the (partial) URL to the image in the database. Then the original code would work. It would also be more efficient. 🙂

leatherback

Weedpacket wrote:
One of the ways this could be simplified would be to store the images in the file system, and then store the (partial) URL to the image in the database. Then the original code would work. It would also be more efficient. 🙂

Hi Weed,

yes I agree.
-- /me feels stupid for not mentioning it before --

reflash

Weedpacket - I assume that you are talking about separately uploading the image to a folder and then just referencing it with the partial URL from the database. That's how I've been doing it up to now. The problem is that I'm putting this site together for a very non-technical client, and need to keep it as simple as possible. Is there a way to upload an image to the file system from a web form? And if so, can you point me to somewhere that I can read up on it?

bradgrafelman

Read this man page: [man]features.file-upload[/man]