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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T13:29:02+00:00

I am trying to create thumbnail pics using GD lib in Cake PHP. I

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I am trying to create thumbnail pics using GD lib in Cake PHP.

I can write the resized thumbnail to the tmp directory, and create the sensible URL to show the image from the tmp directory:

//set up empty GD resource  
$tmp = imagecreatetruecolor(200*$iw/$ih, 200);
//create thumbnail image in the empty GD resource
imagecopyresampled($tmp, $src, 0, 0, 0, 0,200*$iw/$ih, 200, $iw, $ih);
//build full path to thumbnail in the cakephp tmp directory
$thumbfile = APP.'tmp/thumb.jpg';
//build URL path to the same thumbnail
$thumblink = $this->webroot.'tmp/thumb.jpg';
//write jpeg to the tmp directory
$return=imagejpeg($tmp,$thumbfile);
//write out the image to client browser
echo "<img=\"$thumblink\" alt=\"thumb\" height=\"200\" width=\"200*$iw/$ih\">";

The thumbnail gets created and written to the tmp directory, but when I try to access the URL I get the following error message:

Error: TmpController could not be found.
Error: Create the class TmpController below in file: app/Controller/TmpController.php

Obviously I have a routing error – Cake tries to call the tmp controller, in stead of looking in the tmp direcectory. How can I fix this, or is there an alternative way to serve temporary thumbnails using GD lib?
I am planning to create unique thumbnails per session or user, but I need to get this working first.

Routing in Config/routes.php:

Router::connect('/', array('controller' => 'MsCake', 'action' => 'index'));
Router::connect('/pages/*', array('controller' => 'pages'));
CakePlugin::routes();

I looked at ThumbnailHelper, but that doesn’t use GD Lib. I also need to be able to access files stored on non-apache accessible directories from outside, but I can’t even access any temporary symbolic links to get to them. eg.

  • create a temporary symbolic link in the tmp directory, pointing to the file in question.
  • create a HTML link, pointing to the symbolic link using $this->webroot.’tmp/link-to-myfile’, as above

…and I get the same error as above – Error: TmpController could not be found.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Don’t do that

    If you do anything to make files in the tmp dir web-accessible – you’re severely lowering your site’s security. Things in the tmp directory are never supposed to be web accessible.

    Put your images in the webroot

    A better idea is to put your temporary images in the webroot directory – which is the only directory that is ordinarily web accessible. For example:

    $filename = md5($userId);
$thumbfile = APP.'webroot/img/cache/' . $filename . '.jpg';

...
$url = '/img/cache/' . $filename . '.jpg';

    Or route to a controller action

    Alternatively, route to a controller action to handle the request using the media view class. Note however though, that serving images with php is not free – there can be a noticable delay while your request is processed – where’as pointing at a static file does not have this cost/risk since it’s just the webserver taking care of serving the content.

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