Using PHP to access/set JPG author information

mknapp

Hi everybody -

I was wondering if there was a handy way to access the "author" attribute from a jpg image using php.

What I'm trying to do is show image credits (who uploaded the picture) for a series of jpg images in a website.

I've considered adding a string to the image file name when a user uploads a photo to the site, and then searching for the string when it needs to be displayed, but it seems there must be a better way to do this.

Thanks.

NogDog

How about tracking the info in a database table?

djjjozsi

if the user logged in with his/her passsword and email address or username,
will get a userID from the database. (store that in session)

you store their images in a folder name is his/her ID number, and for a security reason, lets store the userID value in the images database too, in a field owner.

And when somebody list the gallery, you can make the owner's details.

SELECT * FROM images,users WHERE images.owner_id=users.user_id AND ....

and you get the user-name, and details with the uploaded image location too.

mknapp

Thanks for the suggestions djjjozsi and NogDog.

Both of your suggestions would clearly work great.

In the end, I decided that, as a user would upload an image to the site, they would enter the photo credit (the "author") into a text box, which would then be embedded directly into the image in the lower left corner. The new image (with the text) is then saved as a jpg.

Here's the code:

<?php

$font_file = 'plant_images/arialbd.ttf';
$font_size = 12; // font size in pts
$image_file = 'plant_images/test2.jpg';
$dims = getimagesize($image_file);
$image = imagecreatefromjpeg($image_file);
$font_color = imagecolorallocate ($image, 0, 0, 0);
$x_finalpos = 5;
$y_finalpos = $dims[1] - 10;
$text1 = 'Courtesy of: ';
$text2 = 'Ed Leonetti';
$finaltext = $text1 . $text2;

imagettftext($image, $font_size, 0, $x_finalpos , $y_finalpos , $font_color, $font_file, $finaltext);

header('Content-type: image/jpeg');

imagejpeg($image, 'simpletext2.jpg', 95);
exit ;

Thanks again for the great suggestions.

djjjozsi

nice,
but the user could download the image without that "code"?
and you might watch the usage of a string cleaning method with preg_replace.
delete from the textfild's value all characters which are not an alphabetical.

jjozsi