Example
This example is how to turn an image into a Base64 string (i.e. a string you can use directly in a src attribute of an img tag). This example specifically uses the Imagick library (there are others available, such as GD as well).
<?php
/**
* This loads in the file, image.jpg for manipulation.
* The filename path is releative to the .php file containing this code, so
* in this example, image.jpg should live in the same directory as our script.
*/
$img = new Imagick('image.jpg');
/**
* This resizes the image, to the given size in the form of width, height.
* If you want to change the resolution of the image, rather than the size
* then $img->resampleimage(320, 240) would be the right function to use.
*
* Note that for the second parameter, you can set it to 0 to maintain the
* aspect ratio of the original image.
*/
$img->resizeImage(320, 240);
/**
* This returns the unencoded string representation of the image
*/
$imgBuff = $img->getimageblob();
/**
* This clears the image.jpg resource from our $img object and destroys the
* object. Thus, freeing the system resources allocated for doing our image
* manipulation.
*/
$img->clear();
/**
* This creates the base64 encoded version of our unencoded string from
* earlier. It is then output as an image to the page.
*
* Note, that in the src attribute, the image/jpeg part may change based on
* the image type you're using (i.e. png, jpg etc).
*/
$img = base64_encode($imgBuff);
echo "<img alt='Embedded Image' src='data:image/jpeg;base64,$img' />";
