convert html image data url to a hosted image - php

Question

I have a page that is generating image data urls from a snapshot tool and inserting the resulting string into a MySQL database via PHP. Later on I have a page that takes and uses those images. This would be fine except I need to save the resulting html to my server for some post processing and the length of the image data urls is giving me a headache and making the html files upwards of 8 to 10 MBs which slows down the entire process. The image looks something like this:
<img src="data:image/png:base64,iVBORw0K43+gAA4u...">
Where there is an extremely long string of characters making the resulting html very large. Is there a way to host this on my server as a png so the link is a normal looking image? Something like this:
<img src="http://www.mysite.com/image1.png">

Answer 1

What about converting base64 to an original image, what you would be doing is saving the image as a actual file to the server.
Php to convert base64 data to image
function toImage($base_code){
$img_file = imagecreatefromstring(base64_decode($base_code));
imagejpeg($img_file, 'new.jpg');
}
Calling the function
echo toImage($encoded_image);
Make sure to only pass the base64 encoded string without the image tag

Answer 2

You can save the files elsewhere, but my guess is that you've got a requirement the images exist in the DB. If you save the files elsewhere, you've just doubled your disk requirements.
In any case, the general fix for this would be to save that image string to disk, and in your DB keep track of the path. Then when you generate the HTML, you'd use the path in the DB, rather than the binary data in the DB.