I have a site that has to generate many images of varying sizes from original high res images.. Right now I have a pretty wide open permissions folder inside of public_html where the 99/99 user generates those resized images and then I just serve the image using a regular old <img src="whatever.jpg" />.. I know having such a folder inside of root could be a security issue so what I am considering doing is placing the folder they are generated into outside of root and then use php to read that image and render it in the browsers window.. but I'm concerned.
How much more resource intensive on the server is it using php similar to
<?php
$path = str_replace('..','',$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);
$fullpath = '/home/folder/folder/'.$path;
if(!is_file($fullpath)) { exit('Image not found');}
header('Content-type:image/jpg');
readfile($fullpath);
?>
than just serving up the .jpg?
