I have a site that currently uses images on a file server. The images appear on a page where the user can drag and drop each as is needed. This is done with jQuery and the images are enclosed in a list. Each image is pretty standard:

<img src='//network_path/image.png' height='80px'>

Now however I need to reference images stored as a BLOB in an Oracle database (no choice on this, so not a merit discussion). I have no problem retrieving the BLOB and displaying on it's own using:

$sql = "SELECT image FROM images WHERE image_id = 123";
$stid = oci_parse($conn, $sql);
oci_execute($stid);
$row = oci_fetch_array($stid, OCI_ASSOC+OCI_RETURN_NULLS);
$img = $row['IMAGE']->load();
header("Content-type: image/jpeg");
print $img;

But I need to [efficiently] get that image as the src attribute of the img tag. I tried imagecreatefromstring() but that just returns the image in the browser, ignoring the other html. I looked at data uri, but the IE8 size limit rules that out.

So now I am kind of stuck. My searches keep coming up with using a src attribute that loads another page that contains the image. But I need the image itself to actually show on the page. (Note: I say image, meaning at least one image but as many as eight on a page).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.