In my application i display the image of user by giving the physical path of the directories like http://www.example.com/user_images/abcdefghijk.jpg
But i dont want to expose this physical path to the external users to access the direct files.
I want to implement the image retrieval as per the gravtar type image display. How we can do that?
In PHP you can use GD library to read the image. So the only way you need to create a image.php file & use the following code,
<?php
$imagepath="your image physical path";
$image=imagecreatefromjpeg($imagepath);
header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
imagejpeg($image);
?>
this is for jpg image for all other images you can use different functions fo GD library.
So Gravtar.com uses the above way to display the image :)
In ROR you can use Rmagick gem to read the image & display the image with the same way.
Thanks
in php you can save a variable in session and append it to image's path like
<img src="php_function.php?token=1234" />
and in php file get the image reading from session its actual path and return the content by file_get_contents
here is the source http://hashmode.com/hide-image-path-php/9