Question

I’m using a SelectQuery object to retrieve and display a list of users, but I don’t know where to get the user’s picture from.

The users table has a column called picture, but the data in there is just an integer. Is the picture stored in a blob field somewhere or is there a link to the picture in another table?

Answer 1

The image file itself is stored (usually) somewhere in /sites/default/files. The reference to that image is stored in the file_managed table, the picture column in the users table contains the fid (file id) of the picture.

You can load the file object like this:

$file = file_load($fid);

And get the output for the image like this:

$image = theme('image', array('path' => $file->uri, 'alt' => 'Alt text'));