I 100% agree with Larry. The file system is FAR better suited to handle images than a BLOB field in a database. Larry Helms wrote: > > Only authorized persons should have direct access to the files - without using the browser > - there are ways (using apache) to make it such that you can't 'browse' images in a > directory. The most common way is to use URI pathings. Create your images directory OUTSIDE of public_html/ or htdocs/ (or whatever config your host has for its document web root) Ie, /home/users/yourname/public_html/ is your webroot where your index.php file is located. create /home/users/yourname/safeimagedirectory/ Then, with simple simple mod_rewrite and a processing script, you can call <img src="/images/uniquefilename.jpg" /> which, to the user appears to be a real url, actually isn't. use a condition and rule in htaccess to redirect all image requests to images.php, call it via the URI, and spit it back. A good example of a free tool that does this is the popular Gallery software. There are options on set up to place the store outside of public_html/
