Question

as most of you probably know, we can serve images from PHP using constructs like this:

RewriteRule ^images/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)\.jpg script.php?image=$1

And then in PHP:

header('Content-Type: image/png');
$image=imagecreatefromjpeg($pathComputedSomewhereElse);
imagejpeg($image);

That’s dead simple, but that’s not my problem – i simply don’t want to confuse you.

My question is:

How can I, if it is possible, serve such image directly, using PHP only to fetch image path? I want Apache to do the work, not PHP reading file and outputting data as binary stream. Prototype markup would be as follows [same .htaccess]:

header('Content-Type: image/png');
header('Location: '.$pathComputedSomewhereElse);

Answer 1

If you have mod_xsendfile installed in your Apache, you can do exactly what you need without the client seeing the path they are redirected to.

header("X-Sendfile: /path/to/your/filename");
header("Content-type: image/jpeg");

See a background article here

Alternatively, if the client is allowed to see the new URL, I don’t see why using a 302 header wouldn’t work:

header("Location: http://example.com/path/to/your/imagefile.jpg");
die();