Laravel 5 - How to access image uploaded in storage within View?

Question

The best approach is to create a symbolic link like @SlateEntropy very well pointed out in the answer below. To help with this, since version 5.3, Laravel includes a command which makes this incredibly easy to do:

php artisan storage:link

That creates a symlink from public/storage to storage/app/public for you and that's all there is to it. Now any file in /storage/app/public can be accessed via a link like:

http://somedomain.com/storage/image.jpg

---

If, for any reason, your can't create symbolic links (maybe you're on shared hosting, etc.) or you want to protect some files behind some access control logic, there is the alternative of having a special route that reads and serves the image. For example a simple closure route like this:

Route::get('storage/{filename}', function ($filename)
{
    $path = storage_path('public/' . $filename);

    if (!File::exists($path)) {
        abort(404);
    }

    $file = File::get($path);
    $type = File::mimeType($path);

    $response = Response::make($file, 200);
    $response->header("Content-Type", $type);

    return $response;
});

You can now access your files just as you would if you had a symlink:

http://somedomain.com/storage/image.jpg

If you're using the Intervention Image Library you can use its built in response method to make things more succinct:

Route::get('storage/{filename}', function ($filename)
{
    return Image::make(storage_path('public/' . $filename))->response();
});

---

WARNING

Keep in mind that by manually serving the files you're incurring a performance penalty, because you're going through the entire Laravel request lifecycle in order to read and send the file contents, which is considerably slower than having the HTTP server handle it.

One option would be to create a symbolic link between a subfolder in your storage directory and public directory.

For example

ln -s /path/to/laravel/storage/avatars /path/to/laravel/public/avatars

This is also the method used by Envoyer, a deployment manager built by Taylor Otwell, the developer of Laravel.

According to Laravel 5.2 docs, your publicly accessible files should be put in directory

storage/app/public

To make them accessible from the web, you should create a symbolic link from public/storage to storage/app/public.

ln -s /path/to/laravel/storage/app/public /path/to/laravel/public/storage

Now you can create in your view an URL to the files using the asset helper:

echo asset('storage/file.txt');

If you are on windows you can run this command on cmd:

mklink /j /path/to/laravel/public/avatars /path/to/laravel/storage/avatars 

from: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/278262-mklink-create-use-links-windows.html