Simple PHP Image Upload

I consider myself a fairly descent programmer, not great by any means, but ok; anyway I spent the last three days struggling over a form that would upload a picture to mysql. It shouldn’t be a problem because it’s pretty basic, but I couldn’t get it to work. Why?!!! Gawd, it was frustrating the hell out of me. The form kept passing an empty array…over and over and over I worked with it making the simplest of script and still nothing. Then this morning it dawned on me. I had an epiphany…the harps and trumpets played in tandem at the back of my frustrated mind. *sigh* I was using $_POST and not $_FILES.

Anyhow, here is some simple code for anyone that wants it.

form.php

<?php

     if (!empty($_FILES['imgfile'])){
          echo '<form action="form.php" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" >
               <input type="file" name="imgfile">
               <input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="1000000">
          </form>';
     }else{
          $image = $_FILES['imgfile'];
          //make sure this folder is writeable 666
          $path = '/home/user/public_html/images/';
          copy($image['tmp_name'], $path.$image['name']);
     }
?>

This simple script uploads a file, and then copies it from the temporary php upload directory to your permanent directory with its original name.

If you wanted to insert the object into a mysql database, then, to save space one would encode it - basically turn it into a text file - and insert the image into a field with type longtext. The code would look something like this. Again, this is pretty simple code and no error capture. Code takes off from above.

     copy($image['tmp_name'], $path.$image['name']);

     //open file for reading
     $fp = fopen($path.$image['name'], "r");

          //measure the file contents
          $contents = fread($fp, filesize($path.$image['name']));

     //close the file
     fclose($fp);

     //encode the file to save space in the db
     $encoded = chunk_split(base64_encode($contents));

     //my assumption is that you already have a db setup with a longtext field.
     mysql_query("INSERT INTO images (ID, IMAGE) VALUES (" . $id . ",'" . $encoded . "')");

     //since it's inserted into mysql, you can delete the existing file
     unlink($path.$image['name']);

So now, how do we view the file? Good question and I don’t know….

Nah, here you go

image.php

     <?php

     //My assumption is that you already have connected to the database somewhere
     //and the db has an id field
     $result=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM images WHERE ID='".$_GET['img']."'");

     //fetch data from database
     $data=mysql_fetch_array($result);

     $encoded=$data['data'];

     //close connection
     mysql_close($connection);

     //decode and echo the image data
     echo base64_decode($encoded);

?>

This is a simple usage of it.
<img src=”image.php?img=32″ border=”0″>