In this recipe, we will get a file's path and use it to display an image stored in the file manager.

Once again, we will be referencing an image with the ID of 1. Be sure to adapt the code in this recipe to load an image that actually exists in your concrete5 installation.

Have a look at the following steps:

The file manager stores files in various locations through the concrete5 website, typically beneath the files/ folder, which gets broken up into a few machine-readable folders consisting of integers. Since these paths are too hard to figure out and predict on a regular basis, the file object API allows us to get those paths with a simple function call.

You will need the actual absolute path of a file, if you are working with the image in PHP's fopen function, for instance. For that, you will use the getPath function:

$fullPath = $file->getPath();