Question

Oddly enough, I can’t find any info on this topic: user profile pictures.

Is there a PHP solution for the following?

• Allows users to upload a pic from their hard drive for storage on our server
• Shrinks the image if it’s too big; expands it if it’s too small (height/width)

Is this easy to build yourself? Or is there already a library for it?

Answer 1

To upload and store the image, I would recommend generating a random filename for the picture, instead of keeping the original file name. This will prevent conflicts and also add a measure of security. I would suggest a pretty long name; just random numbers and letters.

Then, store the random file name in the database record along with your user info. This way, you won’t have to worry about file names and user names getting out of sync, and, as I said earlier, someone won’t be able to guess that Joe Schmoe’s profile picture is stored as JoeSchmoe.jpg.

For when you get to the image-resizing part, use this function below I modified (from the PHP user comments). In your case, "images/smallerpicture.jpeg" would probably be replaced by "images/<some random name here>.jpeg".

Example:

scaleImage("images/bigpicture.jpeg", 100, 100, "images/smallerpicture.jpeg");

Function:

function scaleImage($source, $max_width, $max_height, $destination) {
    list($width, $height) = getimagesize($source);
    if ($width > 150 || $height > 150) {
        $ratioh = $max_height / $height;
        $ratiow = $max_width / $width;
        $ratio = min($ratioh, $ratiow);
        // New dimensions
        $newwidth = intval($ratio * $width);
        $newheight = intval($ratio * $height);

        $newImage = imagecreatetruecolor($newwidth, $newheight);

        $exts = array("gif", "jpg", "jpeg", "png");
        $pathInfo = pathinfo($source);
        $ext = trim(strtolower($pathInfo["extension"]));

        $sourceImage = null;

        // Generate source image depending on file type
        switch ($ext) {
        case "jpg":
        case "jpeg":
            $sourceImage = imagecreatefromjpeg($source);
            break;
        case "gif":
            $sourceImage = imagecreatefromgif($source);
            break;
        case "png":
            $sourceImage = imagecreatefrompng($source);
            break;
        }

        imagecopyresampled($newImage, $sourceImage, 0, 0, 0, 0, $newwidth, $newheight, $width, $height);

        // Output file depending on type
        switch ($ext) {
        case "jpg":
        case "jpeg":
            imagejpeg($newImage, $destination);
            break;
        case "gif":
            imagegif($newImage, $destination);
            break;
        case "png":
            imagepng($newImage, $destination);
            break;
        }
    }
}

It supports gifs, jpgs, and pngs.