Question

I am building a website where I am uploading images to my ftp folder through PHP script. Now I want to display those images on to my HTML pages. I was thinking about using PHP and getting array of all the images from my ftp folder and then display them using image view.

Please tell me if I am doing this the wrong way and if there is any other better alternatives to it. I was reading php manual for ftp_nlist and ftp_rawlist but did not understand.

Answer 1

Well it may depend on how many images you have in there. Probably the most “correct” way to do it would be to store the filenames in a DB. You could scan the entire folder, but for every single request that’s potentially a lot of overhead rather than just grabbing them out of a DB.
Are you manually uploading the images? Give us more details on how that works and we can better serve you. If you’re using a script to upload images (I’ve had lots of projects where that’s the case), then you can just have the script insert those filepaths into the DB for you. If not, (you’re manually uploading them), or if indeed there are not a large number of files, then scanning the folder wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. I’ve used that method on smaller projects myself.

Read up on the php readdir function in the docs (which actually works a lot like mysql_fetch_assoc, ironically)- That will provide you with an excellent way to go without setting up a DB. For an approach where an upload script handles it, I recommend a DB. Without more info, it’s hard to say.
Good luck!