Question

Users will be able to upload images and the name will be changed so it doesn’t have the same name as another file. Using a simple convention like calling them 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg and so on will mean other users can simple type in 4.jpg and see someone else’s image.

Is there a way or a convention for naming images different while still ensuring guessing an image name is hard?

Answer 1

You could just write a PHP script to generate some pseudo random image name each time, like 21412adfs.jpg.

Better yet, take the name of the file being uploaded, and append a 6 digit random number to it or something, say, 19353–toy–car.png, you could even replace the 6 digit number with a number representing the date of the image uploaded.

Naming conventions can be in any form you want really, whatever works best for your setup and archive purposes. Including the date in the image name can be good, as you could easily sort images into different upload folders depending on their dates, etc.