What is the correct path I need to see my uploaded image?

Question

In my web application one of my pages is uploading a photo to the path

/usr/local/rac/picture-name-goes-here

The photo is uploading fine, but I need to acces

Answer 1

There is one major misconception here. HTML is executed by the webbrowser, not by the webserver. The webbrowser downloads HTML, scans for any resources which needs to be downloaded as well (CSS, scripts, images, etc) and fires a new HTTP request for each of them. All resources should point to a valid URL, not to some local disk file system path which the client machine has no notion of.

There are basically two ways to solve this "problem":

1. Add a new Context to Tomcat's /conf/server.xml:

   <Context docBase="/usr/local/agent" path="/images" />
   

   This way they'll be accessible through http://example.com/images/... and you'll be able to use the following <img>

   <img src="/images/photo-name-here.jpg"/>
   

2. Create a Servlet which basically gets an InputStream of the image and writes it to the OutputStream of the response along a correct set of headers. You can find here a basic example of such a servlet and here a more advanced example. When the Servlet is mapped on /images/* in web.xml, the images are accessible by http://example.com/contextname/images/... and you'll be able to use it as follows (assuming that the JSP/HTML file is located in the context root):

   <img src="images/photo-name-here.jpg"/>
   

Answer 2

src="/usr/local/agent/photo-name-here.jpg" <- this URL is a local address in your server, to show up your images you have to set a valid HTTP address like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/images/photo-name-here.jpg

To accomplish that you will need to upload the foto to a localpath that is inside in your www root folder.

If your webapp is installed in

• /home/apache/www/website/

you will upload your images to a folder like:

• /home/apache/www/website/images/

and then your HTTP address will be

• http://www.yourdomain.com/images/photo-name-here.jpg

I got a little confuse with your two paths in /usr/ and C:\Tomcat

I encourage you to put the upload localpath folder parametrized, so you will be only modifying the config file instead of every function or method that access to that local path.