Way I see it is this - you need four parts to your code. For preference I'd put things like database connections and paths to file storage in constants that you can include wherever you need them. The objective is to store your images in fixed directory, give them unique names if you need to, refer to the directory using a constant (so you can use it anywhere in your script) Store only the filenames in your database then when you need an image, you simply rebuild the path and filename by recombining the constant with the result of your SQL statement.
So you define the path to your image directory thus:
define("MAIN_IMAGE_STORE","../images/");
you then need to upload and store images in this directory thus:
$whereto=MAIN_IMAGE_STORE.$_FILES['ulfile']['name'];
$result=copy($_FILES['ulfile']['tmp_name'],$whereto);
(don't forget - never trust anything uploaded to your server!!!)
you also need to extract the filename from the uploaded file thus:
$image_name=$_FILES['ulfle']['name'];
(you can do some checks here to see if the image-name already exists and inform your user accordingly)
You store this filename ONLY in the database. (You do not need to store the path - that is already set in your path constant - the beauty is if you need to change the path, you do so simply by creating the new directory and updating the constant.)
"UPDATE database_table SET my_image = '$image_name WHERE ... etc
To retrieve the image for display you create your SQL to fetch the required filename from the database, "SELECT my_image FROM database_table WHERE guid = xxxx.xxxx...." or whatever, and include this result into your IMG tag, see the code snippet given by cmarkme. HOWEVER this time you need to specify the location of the image by rebuilding the path from your constant plus the image-name you have retrieved from the database; which is of course (simplified as):
$image_name=$row['image_name'];
or...
$full_path=MAIN_IMAGE_STORE.$image_name;
or...
<img src='".MAIN_IMAGE_STORE.$image_name."' ... etc>
Obviously your choice of syntax is personal in the code snippets above. You could build the entire path and filename first, or simply concatenate the whole thing into one line of code.
There is loads of stuff on this topic in the php manual. I hope this helps, it's a bit stilted I know and there are so many possibilities, but this should point you in one direction that will work a treat and is fairly efficient both from handling the images and database frugality.
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