How can I load an image from a local directory in PHP?

Question

My setup (or path) is as follows:

 |Home
    |ftpUsername
        |assets
           |images.png
           |script.php
        |mydomain.com
           |index.php

index.php is located in mydomain.com, which includes script.php in /home/ftpUsername/assets without a problem.

script.php is included in index.php using the include() function. My question is, how can I get PHP to load the images (png format) which are in /home/ftpUsername/assets/ through script.php?

In other words: How can I load /home/ftpUsername/assets/myimage.png in script.php?

Note: /home/ftpUsername/mydomain.com/ is a live directory (is online attached to a domain) and home/ftpUsername/assets/ is not (local directory on the server).

I have tried loading it directly from path using img src="/home/ftpUsername/assets/myimage.png" to no avail, with and without a backslash.

Answer 1

From script.php, you need to read, then output the PNG image (passing the right mimetype, so it will be recognized as an image).

You may use readfile or even file_get_contents to read filestream, like this: (I'm assuming you'll pass the image name by $_GET 'image'. /script.php?image=imagename.png and using a no_image.png as a fallback.

header("Content-Type:image/png"); //passing the mimetype

$image = '/home/ftpUsername/assets/' . $_GET['image']; 

if(is_file($image) ||  is_file($image = "/home/ftpUsername/assets/no_image.png"))
    readfile($image);

This way, you may link your script.png directly in your img src, just like this:

<img src="script.php?image=imagename.png" alt="" />

Your script.php will act just like an image.