Question

ImageCopyMerge only appears to only process the bottom image?

As a trial I am trying to overlay and offset a white and blue image

$dest = '../images/pictures/white.gif';
$src = '../images/pictures/blue.gif';
imagecopymerge($dest, $src, 12, 65, 0, 0, 175, 260, 50);
imagegif($dest);
imagedestroy($dest);
imagedestroy($src);

and then later in the HTML display the output

<img src="<?php echo($dest); ?>" />

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

To do process your images first need to load the images into RAM using the imagecreatefrom* functions.

$dest = imagecreatefromgif(''../images/pictures/white.gif');
$src = imagecreatefromgif('../images/pictures/blue.gif');

The following won’t work either.

<img src="<?php echo($dest); ?>" />

You either need to link to the php script which calls the imagegif() function

<img src="your/script.php" />

or you need to convert the imagedata into an data URL (but i wouldn’t recomend that if the image is large).

ob_start();
imagegif($dest);
$imagedata = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
echo '<img src="data:image/png;base64,"' . base64($imagedata) . '" />';