I've really made an over-a-google-research about my problem but i still have no clue.

Actually, i can create thumbnails, but in the way i don't like much:
<image src="thumbnail_script.php?image=$image">

I want to have smth like this:
<image src=show_thumbnail($image)>

What i'm trying to do:

PHP Code:

function show_thumbnail($image_path){
    
    list($width,$height) = getimagesize($image_path);
        $new_height = 75;
        $k = $new_height / $height;
        $new_width = $width * $k;


        $image_thumb = imagecreatetruecolor($new_width,$new_height);
        $image_thumb_tmp = imagecreatetruecolor($new_width,$new_height);
        $image = imagecreatefromjpeg($image_path);
        imagecopyresampled($image_thumb,$image,0,0,0,0,$new_width,$new_height,$width,$height);

//     header('Content-type: image/jpeg', true);
        imagejpeg($image_thumb, '', 100);
        imagedestroy($image_thumb);
    } 


I get either raw data or "header already sent" error - when i use header('Content-type: image/jpeg', true);

I need to have a function which returns an image, rather then a raw data. I don't want to save this temporary-thumb-file to disk as well.

Does anybody has a clue if it is possible?

Thank you.

You cannot make a function which returns an image. You cannot mix php and html in a way like this since php works on server and generates html which is parsed on client. Look at source of any page which contains images to get the idea. You will have either to generate ready static images and write img src="/path/to/thumnail.jpg" or to write img src="/path/to/thumbnail/script.php?image=123" and within the script.php create resized image and send it to client as binary stream.

And why don't you want to save the file to disk? This is preferred a lot because it makes less load for your server. Do you know that apache on average hardware can process (give away) about 1000 static files per second and hardly 50 image-generating php scripts?

Thanks.
I'm going to save them to disk.