I'm designing an image repository. I want to uncouple the filename from the image html link. For instance:
images/items/12543.jpg<img src="images/car.jpg" />Does anyone strongly discourages me to rewrite all image requests using PHP so when retrieving images/car.jpg, Apache really replies content from images/items/12543.jpg?
I don't know if I may get performance problems.
It may take a long time until you will get actual performance problems with this, but running each request for a resource through PHP (every process, especially when connecting to a database or doing other complex things, taking up considerable memory on each request) is a bad idea architecturally IMO.
I would recommend either translating 12543 to car in the file system already, and then doing a (cheaper) URL rewrite for it:
* images/items/car.jpg
* <img src="images/car.jpg" />
Alternative idea: How about doing it like Stack Overflow. Name the jpeg 12543.jpg and do
<img src="images/12543/car.jpg">
(The car part being arbitrary and there only for the user's and search engines' enjoyment - what is really parsed by the rewrite rule, and used to fetch the image, is only the 12543 and the .jpg).