I want to create several images with PHP on my webpage. Is there a way to do this without creating each image in its own PHP file and then placing the URLs to these files in img tags?
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4 Answers
I suggest you take the image and encode it to BASE64 using base64_encode(), this way you can insert the image data directly into the HTML markup (safer than injecting binary).
The process is described at this site. But in a nutshell just have a tag that looks like the following (everything after the "base64," is the encoded data):
<img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAOALMAAOazToeHh0tLS/7LZv/0jvb29t/f3//Ub/
/ge8WSLf/rhf/3kdbW1mxsbP//mf///yH5BAAAAAAALAAAAAAQAA4AAARe8L1Ekyky67QZ1hLnjM5UUde0ECwLJoExKcpp
V0aCcGCmTIHEIUEqjgaORCMxIC6e0CcguWw6aFjsVMkkIr7g77ZKPJjPZqIyd7sJAgVGoEGv2xsBxqNgYPj/gAwXEQA7"
width="16" height="14" alt="embedded folder icon">
3 Comments
Frank Farmer
Unfortunately, IE versions <8.0 don't support data URIs at all, which makes them pretty useless for most public facing web apps. And IE8 limits them to 32k.
Annie
You can use MHTML in IE7 and under: phpied.com/mhtml-when-you-need-data-uris-in-ie7-and-under
TravisO
Realize this method means the browser cannot cache the image, because it's inside the mark-up, therefore your server is using more bandwidth. To conserve bandwidth use the .php?id=100 style methods described elsewhere, because servers & browsers can cache that improving speed and bandwidth
No, there's no other way as the content-type header is page-wide; you can't have different content types for one page. But you don't need to have one PHP file for each of your images, you can do it like this:
<img src="image_generator.php" />
And in image_generator.php, you declare the image header and output the image, and possibly generate it according to a query string. For example, you can append a image id to the URL:
<img src="image_generator.php?id=100" />
Then in image_generator.php, just select the image data according to $_GET['id'] and generate it.
Comments
You either use a header and output directly the image bytes, or write them to a file and put them in the src attribute, there is no other way.
A neat approach is to have a specific image creation script you reference in your src attribute:
<img src="imagecreator.php?img=43" />
In this script you obviously should use the header() approach and output the image bytes.
<?php
$im = imagecreatefrompng($_GET['img'].".png"); //Silly example
header('Content-type: image/png');
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);
?>
Comments
A possible solution, to not have several PHP scripts, would be to have only one, that would be able to generate a different image depending on a parameter.
For instance, some pseudo-code like this one should make what I mean more clear :
$id_img = intval($_GET['id']);
switch ($id_img) {
case '1':
// generate image 1
break;
case '2':
// generate image 2
break;
case '3':
// generate image 3
break;
default:
// send some kind of 404 error
}
And your <img> tags would look a bit like these :
<img src="http://yoursite.com/img-generator.php?id=1" alt="..." />
<img src="http://yoursite.com/img-generator.php?id=2" alt="..." />
Still, each time the PHP script is generated, it can only return the headers an data for only one image -- which means it has to be called several times.
