Render image on the fly vs. saving thumbnails

[eluser]missionsix[/eluser]
Well since I am supply people with a simple image hosting service, i supply them with the media URL (which passes through the media handler). An example of this would be

Code:

/media/image/032984083/?w=800

Where the media id is a one to one relationship with the image id stored in the database. And then the w=800 lets the script know the final image needs to be 800 pixels wide, so it might it. To me this allows for a lot of flexibility in image manipulation.

So everyone just links to their content with that url structure. The actual image locations are stored on outside of the www folder, which means they cannot be accessed directly.