Images Accessed Directly Sent to a Page with Image on It

[iFroggy]

Hello,

I'm not exactly sure how to word this, but what I want is to install something on my server that makes it that when people access an image directly (.gif, .jpg) on my server, they are redirected to a page with that image on it, but with an ad above the image and a counter code below it. I recall seeing something like this before where it was automatic. You could link people directly to images and it automatically served these sort of pages...

If anyone knows how that might be accomplished or what they are called or whatever, I'd appreciate any input.

Thanks.

Patrick

[Mittineague]

Couldn't this be done with Apache? Something like
HTTP direct request for image
regex portions sent to "image display.php?img=regex_portion"
display.php shows page with the "pulled" image in it (and other stuff).

[masm50]

I would like to know this as well - could be very useful

Tim

[Mittineague]

I came across this other SP thread today. The technique involves having Apache have PHP parse php files with the png extension. The "png.php" file uses REQUEST_URI to get the original file name.
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=418260

[iFroggy]

Thanks for the replies.

I appreciate the info, Mittineague. That stuff may be a bit over my head, though.

As an aside, I just moved from West Springfield.

[masm50]

Same location, same post count (almost) - I think one of you two is superman

Tim

[Mittineague]

Off Topic:

Any relation to S O'Keefe that work(ed|s) at BMC, and married S ?

[iFroggy]

lol, masm50. That is funny. At the moment of posting, we have the exact post count.

Anyway, no relation that I know of, sorry.

[iFroggy]

I just thought I'd bring this up once to see if anyone who knows of something ready to go might have missed it. Thanks.

[Mittineague]

I just finished something somewhat similar for some cheesy mid files I put back online. More for hot-link protection than for serving additional content, but maybe you could adapt it to your goal.
In the page that has the links to the files

session_start
if isset session
  check db for match 
  if not within acceptable time frame - unset
if not set
  set session
  enter info into db

In htaccess (note* not usiing add-type)

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(regex_here)\.mid$ $1/file_name_here.php

In the file that's redirected to

session_start
  if issest session
  preg_match session or unset
  check db for match and acceptable time or unset
if isset session
 - use $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] to get name of file
 - serve with header("Content-Type: audio/mid");
if not isset (here's where to get inventive, what I did is:)
 - serve random mid file instead of requested file

I think for a redirect you would need to serve the php file as javascript with a location=new_page. You could have that page be a dynamically generated one that has the requested image in it, so the image would be in a page, not by itself.
I don't think you could just use only htaccess to redirect to the new page directly, (not that it can't be done) eg. if someone has a page with
<img src='your_img ...
sending back a page wouldn't go into the tag's src
Alternatives might be creating a new image with the requested image in it, or water-marking.

[iFroggy]

Thanks for that.

I'm really looking for something seamless. I don't have to make a change to any existing files, etc. (unless it's .htaccess, etc.). Just something I set into place easily and then it works on all of my images if accessed directly. I don't really have any programming knowledge.

[Mittineague]

I did a bit of experimenting. I couldn't get javascript to go to an img src (as js), just a broken link. So it may be that the add-type directive would be needed for that (but more likely not possible).
You could just add a rewrite for links to image files. It would result in "broken" image boxes in any page that's hot-linking. But if the image was linked to as an anchor tag URL or requested by the URL in the browser's address bar. htaccess could redirect to the page instead of the image.
Try adding this to your htaccess file (the top 3 lines may already be declared, if so, you won't need to add them again.)

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^test_img.jpg$ file_name_here.php

file_name_here.php

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<p>just some text on the page for testing purposes.</p>
<?php
$request_uri = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
if(stripos($request_uri,".jpg"))/*you don't want to show just any file!*/
{
echo "<img src='" . $request_uri . "' \>";
}
?>
</body>
</html>

Then put a "test_img.jpg" online and make a direct HTTP request for it. You should end up at file_name_here.php
The tricky part will be writing a good RewriteCond
You don't want links from your pages being redirected.
Referer can't be relied upon for 100% as some browsers don't send referer headers. Although maybe some would be good enough for you. But maybe if your images are 2 deep and relatively linked you could test for full path requests? (I don't know if this would work. Does Apache "add" full path to relative path requests?) eg

RewriteCond /secondary_folder/image.gif [NC]

would catch requests for http://www.domain.com/secondary_folder/image.gif
but not relative path requests for
./image.gif