How should I load images if I use token-based authentication

Question

I have a client-side application on domain client-domain.com and a server-side application on domain server-domain.com. There is an API on the serv

Answer 1

My solution to basically this exact same problem, based on Jeferson Tenorio's answer below (option 1), was to sign the URL to my API call with an encryption of the image and the user's JWT token, e.g. path/to/image?token=xxxx. In laravel this is easily accomplished with encrypt($your_object) and decrypt($token) (https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/encryption), and then I used the extracted token to verify the user had access to the file in question. But there are probably many other libraries capable of handling this.

I would be curious if there are any security concerns, but from my perspective the JWT is never exposed via plain text and the encryption relies on a secret key that malicious actors shouldn't have access to, so it seems like it should be fairly secure. My only real complaint is that the token is quite long using this method which does not make for presentable URLs.