how to create a base64encoded string from image resource
Taken from http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.image.php#93393
$image = imagecreatefromstring($file);// start bufferingob_start();imagepng($image);$contents = ob_get_clean();echo "<img src='data:image/png;base64,".base64_encode($contents)."' />";imagedestroy($image);