note 69702 modified in ref.outcontrol by danbrown

Unfortunately, the PHP guys didn't build support into any of the image output functions to return the image instead of outputting it.

Fortunately, we have output buffering to fix that. 

<?php

$im = imagecreatetruecolor(200, 200);

// Other image functions here...

ob_start();
imagepng($im);
$imageData = ob_get_contents();
ob_clean();

?>

You can now use the $imageData variable to either create another GD image, save it, put it in a database, make modifications to the binary, or output it to the user. You can easily check the size of it as well without having to access the disk...just use strlen();

--was--
Unfortunately, the PHP guys didn't build support into any of the image output functions to return the image instead of outputting it.

Fortunately, we have output buffering to fix that. 

<?

$im = imagecreatetruecolor(200, 200);

// Other image functions here...

ob_start();
imagepng($im);
$imageData = ob_get_contents();
ob_clean();

?>

You can now use the $imageData variable to either create another GD image, save it, put it in a database, make modifications to the binary, or output it to the user. You can easily check the size of it as well without having to access the disk...just use strlen();

http://php.net/manual/en/ref.outcontrol.php