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

This can be done using the GD library and output buffering. I don't know how efficient this is compared with other methods, but it doesn't require explicit creation of files.

//$image contains the GD image resource you want to store

ob_start();
imagejpeg($image);
$jpeg_file_contents = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

//now send $jpeg_file_contents to S3

Answer 2

I encounter the same problem, using openstack object store and php-opencloud library.

Here is my solution, which does not use the ob_start and ob_end_clean function, but store the image in memory and in temp file. The size of the memory and the temp file may be adapted at runtime.

// $image is a resource created by gd2
var_dump($image); // resource(2) of type (gd)

// we create a resource in memory + temp file 
$tmp = fopen('php://temp', '$r+');

// we write the image into our resource
\imagejpeg($image, $tmp);

// the image is now in $tmp, and you can handle it as a stream
// you can, then, upload it as a stream (not tested but mentioned in doc http://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-sdk-php/v2/guide/service-s3.html#uploading-from-a-stream)
$s3->putObject(array(
   'Bucket' => $bucket,
   'Key'    => 'data_from_stream.txt',
   'Body'   => $tmp
));

// or, for the ones who prefers php-opencloud :
$container->createObject([
    'name'  => 'data_from_stream.txt',
    'stream' => \Guzzle\Psr7\stream_for($tmp),
    'contentType' => 'image/jpeg'
]);

---

About php://temp (from the official documentation of php):

php://memory and php://temp are read-write streams that allow temporary data to be stored in a file-like wrapper. The only difference between the two is that php://memory will always store its data in memory, whereas php://temp will use a temporary file once the amount of data stored hits a predefined limit (the default is 2 MB). The location of this temporary file is determined in the same way as the sys_get_temp_dir() function.

The memory limit of php://temp can be controlled by appending /maxmemory:NN, where NN is the maximum amount of data to keep in memory before using a temporary file, in bytes.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Once you've got the JPEG in memory (using ImageMagick, GD, or your graphic library of choice), you'll need to upload the object from memory to S3.

Many PHP S3 classes seem to only support file uploads, but the one at Undesigned seems to do what we're after here -

// Manipulate image - assume ImageMagick, so $im is image object
$im = new Imagick();
// Get image source data
$im->readimageblob($image_source);

// Upload an object from a resource (requires size):
$s3->putObject($s3->inputResource($im->getimageblob(), $im->getSize()), 
                  $bucketName, $uploadName, S3::ACL_PUBLIC_READ);

If you're using GD instead, you can use imagecreatefromstring to read an image in from a stream, but I'm not sure whether you can get the size of the resulting object, as required by s3->inputResource above - getimagesize returns the height, width, etc, but not the size of the image resource.