I have written a code, where the user selects a profile picture and then the picture is stored in localhost/user/$username/photos/photo1.gif.
After that, I assigned the filename (photo1.gif) into a session variable so I can display it from all my php scripts. This is working just fine. I can display the picture in every php script by accessing this session variable.
The only problem I have is when I am trying to login from the login page: In the login page I connect to the database, retrieve email and password, check them and if they are OK I redirect the user to home.php. The problem is that the user's photo is not linked to the email so i cannot know the filename of the photo. The only thing I know for sure is the directory (because I can retrieve username from database as well).
Lets say that a user has uploaded 4 photos (photo1, photo2, photo3, photo4 - photo4 was uploaded last). It makes sense that he is currently using photo4 as my profile picture. Is there a way for me to access that folder and retrieve the filename of the picture uploaded last?
Also, as a general question, what is better, store the photos(or files) in a database or server?
A few options:
It would be 'better' to create a photo table and store the user_id and the photo location in that table. Storing the actual photo in the table as a blob is not generally recommended.
Alternatively, to avoid more tables, you could rename the photos as
username_photo1.jpg
username_photo2.jpg
username_photo3.jpg
And then you can retrieve the largest of them.
Finally, another option is to get the file creation date of the photos in the directory and take the most recent photo.