Create Unique Image Names

Question

What\'s a good way to create a unique name for an image that my user is uploading?

I don\'t want to have any duplicates so something like MD5($filename) isn\'t suita

Answer 1

You could take a hash (e.g., md5, sha) of the image data itself. That would help identify duplicate images too (if it was byte-for-byte, the same). But any sufficiently long string of random characters would work.

You can always rig it up in a way that the file name looks like:

/image/0/1/012345678/original-name.jpg

That way the file name looks normal, but it's still unique.