Hiding a real IMG SRC

_sh

I'm building a community site where users can upload pictures - their pics are uploaded to a path similar to the following...

uploads/MEMBERID/photos/PHOTOID_test_large.jpg

The images are stored with sequential ID's appended to the filename, what I want to avoid is ever showing members the real path of the images on the site - is there a sneaky way that I can point such images to a .php file that will disguise the real path?

kkobashi

If you are on an Apache HTTP server, you could probably do this by using the mod_rewrite module. Go visit the Mod Rewrite Forum and ask richardk for assistance. He's a whiz at that kind of stuff.

Weedpacket

kkobashi wrote:
If you are on an Apache HTTP server, you could probably do this by using the mod_rewrite module.

Generally speaking, any web server should be able to do this: it's the responsibility of the web server to relate requests for resources to objects in the filesystem, not the URL's. The URL just specifies what is being asked for - the web server is supposed to figure out where it is. It could be anything so long as the server knows what to do with it.

kkobashi

His question has nothing to do with PHP. Rather than let the question go unanswered I chose to reply to it to help.

This is a problem-solution forum, not a discussion of how things are supposed to work, is it not?

bradgrafelman

kkobashi wrote:
This is a problem-solution forum, not a discussion of how things are supposed to work, is it not?

This particular forum is, yes, and that's why he simply explained how your proposed solution could be expanded to other scenarios that the OP might be facing (e.g. a non-Apache webserver).

In addition, I'll throw out another solution; you could point the IMG source to a PHP script (e.g. "photo.php?mid=123&pid=456", where mid = member ID and pid = photo ID) that does something like:

$path = 'uploads/' . (int)$_GET['mid'] . '/photos/' . (int)$_GET['pid'] . '_test_large.jpg';
if(file_exists($path)) {
    header('Content-Type: image/jpeg'); // assuming all images are JPEGs!
    readfile($path);
} else {
    // invalid photo specified
}

Weedpacket

Besides, knowing how something should work makes using it much more productive. Like a chainsaw: it works better if you turn it on.