I've stored a jpeg in a mysql database using the fopen and fread commands then addslashes and placing the contents in a blob field. That's seemingly ok and all. In the past to display the image, I've simply headered the content type and length and then echoed the pic variable and that's worked. Now, that gives me a garbled mess of characters of music notes and such. So, I've tried imagecreatefromstring() and that clears up the characters but just outputs a resource id. What else do I need to do and what exactly is going on? Why won't the jpeg display. Furthermore, is there something more I should be doing when initially storing the image?? Also, I stored the file type but it's image/pjpeg. Is that different from image/jpeg? I've come a long way on learning php, but this is the first time I've worked with blobs and pictures so any help or advice will be greatly appreciated...even if you just know a place with some good reading on the subject will help me tremendously. Moreover, please do not tell me to store the filepath and just use a file system for pictures. Please try to stick to the problems in question. Many thanks in advance.