Pulling IMG Into PHP File

Question

I have a PHP file and an image in the same directory. How could I get the PHP file to set it's headers as jpeg and "pull" the image into it. So if I went to file.php it would show the image. If I rewrite file.php to file_created.jpg and it needs to work.

Answer 1

Should be easy as:

<?php
    $filepath= '/home/foobar/bar.jpg';
    header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
    echo file_get_contents($filepath);
?>

You will just have to figure out how to determine the correct mime type, which should be pretty trivial.

Answer 2

Rather than use file_get_contents as suggested by another answer, use readfile and output out some more HTTP headers to play nicely:

   <?php
    $filepath= '/home/foobar/bar.gif'
    header('Content-Type: image/gif');
    header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($filepath));
    readfile($file);
   ?>

readfile reads the data from the file and writes direct to the output buffer, whereas file_get_contents would first pull the entire file into memory and then output it. Using readfile makes a big difference if the file is very large.

If you wanted to get cuter, you could output the last modified time, and check the incoming http headers for the If-Modified-Since header, and return an empty 304 response to tell the browser they already have the current version....here's a fuller example showing how you might do that:

$filepath= '/home/foobar/bar.gif'

$mtime=filemtime($filepath);

$headers = apache_request_headers(); 
if (isset($headers['If-Modified-Since']) && 
    (strtotime($headers['If-Modified-Since']) >= $mtime)) 
{
    // Client's cache IS current, so we just respond '304 Not Modified'.
    header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', $mtime).' GMT', true, 304);
    exit;
}


header('Content-Type:image/gif');
header('Content-Length: '.filesize($filepath));
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', $mtime).' GMT');
readfile($filepath);