Display image from laravel controller - php

Question

Would like to ask if anyone has ever tried to display an image from a Laravel Controller. Below is my code to a Laravel Controller. So basically I just want to hide the actual url of image and add additional validation so I decided to the image call my laravel URL.
Blade code that call the laravel controller
<img src="/image/1">
Route
Route::get('/image/{image_id}', ['as' => 'site.viewImage', 'uses' => 'ImageController#viewImage']);
Controller
public function viewImage($image_id)
{
return Storage::get($image_id . '.png');
}
But this return an error not-found. Am I doing something wrong here?
Note: I'm passing it to the controller because I need to do additional valdiation and to obfuscate the actual url of the file
I tried this code and its working but I would like a laravel type of approach
header("Content-type: image/png");
echo Storage::get($image_id .'.png');exit;
I also tried this approach
$response = response()->make(Storage::get($image_id . '.png'), 200);
$response->header("Content-Type", 'image/png');
return $response;
The laravel approach throws a 404 error.

Answer 1

Have you tried
return response()->file($filePath);
See: https://laravel.com/docs/5.3/responses#file-responses

Answer 2

If you want to show file from public folder
$link=url('link/to/image/'.$imageName);
header("Content-type: image/png");
$imageContent = file_get_contents($link);
echo $imageContent;
die();

Answer 3

Old question but you can do something like this in Laravel 9.x.
Blade:
<img src="/image/1">
Route:
Route::get('/image/{id}', [ImageController::class, 'viewImage']);
Controller:
public function viewImage($id)
{
// $image_path would look something like this: './images/abc.png'
$image_path = $id.'.png';
return response()->file( $image_path );
}