没有在Codeigniter中进行身份验证的图像

Question

I'm building a web application with Codeigniter. I have some images on my server and I want that only logged users can see them. The login is made with the session class of codeigniter.

I don't want that external users can open the image

http://www.mywebapp.com/images/privateimage.jpg

Opening this image I have to control if there is a valid codeigniter session and then give the image.

I've tried to made a controller called "images" and I've tried to add a rule in the htaccess file in order to call a function that checks the session and than sends the image to the client, but this

RewriteRule ^images/(.*)$ index.php?/images/$1 [L]

doesn't work. I don't know very well the rules of the htaccess files and I don't know if there are simplier ways to do this, but I want to preserve the correspondence between the url of the image and its position on the web server if it's possible.

Thank you

Answer 1

Proof Of Concept

First Step. Put the images folder outside the webserver folder, with this nobody can see the images.

Second Step. Create a controler:

<?php
class Viewer extends CI_Controller {
public function __construct() {
    parent::__construct();
    //here you can check if the user has a session if not die!! XD


}

public function index() {
    //nothing here o blank page
} 


public function see_pic($name) {
    header ("Content-type: image/jpeg");
    $ruta = "/folder/with/pics/".$name; 
    $im = imagecreatefromJPEG($ruta);
    @ImageJPEG($im);
        @ImageDestroy($im);
}

?>

And then when you put the image "http://my_server.com/viewer/see_pic/my_dog.jpg"