Question

I let the user upload an image. It then creates a temp file but I don’t want to move it to a permanent address yet because I want to take them to cropphoto.php where they can create a thumbnail from it. If they exit out of the window before this I don’t want it to be saved.

How would I pass the temporary image from the following script:

<?php 
include_once '../dbconnect.php'; 
$protocol = !empty($_SERVER['HTTPS']) ? 'https://' : 'http://';
$domain = $protocol. $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];

function findexts ($filename) {
    $filename = strtolower($filename) ;
    $exts = split("[/\\.]", $filename) ;
    $n = count($exts)-1;
    $exts = $exts[$n];
    return $exts;
}

$SubcatID = $_POST['SubcatID'];
if (empty($SubcatID)){
    $SubcatID = -1;
}

$ext = findexts ($_FILES['photo']['name']) ; 
if ($ext == "jpg" || $ext == "jpeg") {
    $return = 'cropphoto.php?PhotoID='.urlencode($_FILES['photo']['name']);
    header("Location: $return");
} 
else {
    echo "ERROR: The image must be a JPEG";
    exit;
}
?> 

The current url paramater im using just passes the image name but I can’t find the temp folder it is in.

Answer 1

PHP will auto-delete the file when the script exits, unless you take steps to preserve it. I’d suggest moving the file to a staging directory with some unique filename. You pass this filename on to the crop script. The crop script does whatever it has to, and then moves the file to its final destination.

To deal with orphaned files (e.g. the user closed the window), you can have a timed job do a cleanup in the staging directory. Any files older than a certain period (10 minutes, 30 minutes, etc…) get erased. There’s ways to have a browser tell the server that it’s being shut down, but they’re not reliable, so you’d still need this scheduled job to do a proper cleanup.