Question

I want to do things on an image uploaded by the user.

Until now, what I do is:

1. move_uploaded_file
2. imagecreatefrompng

How can I manipulate it without saving it?

Answer 1

When the file is uploaded, it has to be stored somewhere in the server’s /tmp/ folder. Simply load your image from there using $_FILES['name']['tmp_name'].

For example:

$image = imagecreatefrompng($_FILES['blarg']['tmp_name']);

Will load the uploaded file (called blarg) from it’s temporary storage place under something like /tmp/php-12bja. You don’t need to call move_uploaded_file(), and the image doesn’t need to be saved to disk.