PHP/GD/AJAX Interesting Problem....

[bostonmacosx]

I'm interested if there is a solution to this problem.
I'm writing my own little iPhoto to Web application.
When you view the thumbnails you can double click on them to get a medium size view of the photo.

I was intending to have the Double Click do the Following.....

Double click thumbnail --> Reveal DIV for the photo -> Invoke AJAX call to the PHP resizing script. --> the script returns the URL to the resized image --> update DIV with this information.

This however will leave files on the hard drive.

My question is there any way to have the AJAX call return the image data directly and not just a path to the resized file? I know that PHP can output an image directly to a browser and I'm thinking about how to incorporate this with AJAX.

Thanks

[cheerio]

It's better to store all of your images in 2 directories. 1 for thumbs, other for full size.
When people browse, it shows thumbs, and with this script, when somebody clicks the image it shows the full version without refreshing:
http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/

[bostonmacosx]

Still would like to know if you could deliver the image directly from PHP without having to save it out to a file first......

Thanks

[Weedpacket]

Instead of having the script return the URL to a resized image file, and rewriting image source with that: rewrite the image source URL to refer to the script that does the resizing, which (instead of creating a file and returning a URL) returns the binary data itself.

But still, resizing images on the fly is something of a resource hog: consider having the resizing script cache thumbnails that it generates so that it doesn't have to regenerate them more than once. Storage is much cheaper than processor time.