Sending/Displaying a base64 encoded Image

If you set content-type to image/jpeg, you should give just the jpeg data, without the base64 crap. But you're treating the result as if it was html.

You're effectively building a data uri, which is ok, but as you noted, only as an uri. So leave the content type as it is (text/html), and

echo '<img src="data:image/jpeg;base64,'.base64_encode($image_data).'">';

and you're good to go.

I believe it can be done quite efficiently just using php only ... you can use the below function to render images in base64 encoded data

    function binaryImages($imgSrc,$width = null,$height = null){
    $img_src = $imgSrc;
    $imgbinary = fread(fopen($img_src, "r"), filesize($img_src));
    $img_str = base64_encode($imgbinary);

    if(isset($height) && isset($width))
    {
    echo '<img src="data:image/jpg;base64,'.$img_str.'" height="'.$height.'" width="'.$width.'"/>';
    }
    else
    {
    echo '<img src="data:image/jpg;base64,'.$img_str.'"/>';
    }
}

how to use this function

    binaryImages("../images/end.jpg",100,100); 

run the function binaryImages .. 1st parameter is the image path , 2nd is the width and then the height ... height and width are optional