Creating an image without storing it as a local file

Question

Here's my situation - I want to create a resized jpeg image from a user uploaded image, and then send it to S3 for storage, but am looking to avoid writing the resized jpeg to the disk and then reloading it for the S3 request.

Is there a way to do this completely in memory, with the image data JPEG formatted, saved in a variable?

Answer 1

Most people using PHP choose either ImageMagick or Gd2

I've never used Imagemagick; the Gd2 method:

<?php

// assuming your uploaded file was 'userFileName'

if ( ! is_uploaded_file(validateFilePath($_FILES[$userFileName]['tmp_name'])) ) {
    trigger_error('not an uploaded file', E_USER_ERROR);
}
$srcImage = imagecreatefromjpeg( $_FILES[$userFileName]['tmp_name'] );

// Resize your image (copy from srcImage to dstImage)
imagecopyresampled($dstImage, $srcImage, 0, 0, 0, 0, RESIZED_IMAGE_WIDTH, RESIZED_IMAGE_HEIGHT, imagesx($srcImage), imagesy($srcImage));

// Storing your resized image in a variable
ob_start(); // start a new output buffer
  imagejpeg( $dstImage, NULL, JPEG_QUALITY);
  $resizedJpegData = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean(); // stop this output buffer

// free up unused memmory (if images are expected to be large)
unset($srcImage);
unset($dstImage);

// your resized jpeg data is now in $resizedJpegData
// Use your Undesigned method calls to store the data.

// (Many people want to send it as a Hex stream to the DB:)
$dbHandle->storeResizedImage( $resizedJpegData );
?>

Hope this helps.