Problem with vagrant and images

Hello everybody! I am running into a problem with Homestead. I have a piece of code that works well on an online dev server, but fails in the vagrant Homestead one.

The piece of code is an ajax executed one, where I upload an image, save it in a temp directory and send it back to the user, who then crops it. For this, I have two functions, tempUpload and tempCrop. It is failing in tempCrop, and most the line that triggers it is the following:

$img = getimagesize($imgUrl);

$imgUrl is an input with the url to an image in a temp folder. Checking in vagrant, I saw that these images have attributes -rwxrwxrwx 1 vagrant vagrant. The error appearing in the console is "SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 2 of the JSON data".

Again, this works perfect in an online version, so I guess it is either a permission problem or some environment setting. The permissions for the temp folder in vagrant are as following: drwxrwxrwx 1 vagrant vagrant

This is the expanded code:

$imgUrl = $input['imgUrl'];
$imgInitW = $input['imgInitW'];
$imgInitH = $input['imgInitH'];
$imgW = $input['imgW'];
$imgH = $input['imgH'];
$imgY1 = $input['imgY1'];
$imgX1 = $input['imgX1'];
$cropW = $input['cropW'];
$cropH = $input['cropH'];

$jpeg_quality = 100;


$directory = 'temp/';
$filename = sha1(time().time());


$output_filename = $directory.$filename."_cropped";

$img  = getimagesize($imgUrl);

switch(strtolower($img['mime']))
{
    case 'image/png':
        $img_r = imagecreatefrompng($imgUrl);
        $source_image = imagecreatefrompng($imgUrl);
        $type = '.png';
        break;
    case 'image/jpeg':
        $img_r = imagecreatefromjpeg($imgUrl);
        $source_image = imagecreatefromjpeg($imgUrl);
        $type = '.jpg';
        break;
    case 'image/gif':
        $img_r = imagecreatefromgif($imgUrl);
        $source_image = imagecreatefromgif($imgUrl);
        $type = '.gif';
        break;
    default: $options = array(
            "status" => "error",
            "message" => "Please upload only images, with JPG, GIF or PNG format."); 

              print json_encode($options);
        break;
        exit();
}

$resizedImage = imagecreatetruecolor($imgW, $imgH);
imagecopyresampled($resizedImage, $source_image, 0, 0, 0, 0, $imgW, 
            $imgH, $imgInitW, $imgInitH);   


$dest_image = imagecreatetruecolor($cropW, $cropH);
imagecopyresampled($dest_image, $resizedImage, 0, 0, $imgX1, $imgY1, $cropW, 
            $cropH, $cropW, $cropH);    


imagejpeg($dest_image, $output_filename.$type, $jpeg_quality);
//Creating thumbnail to user
$img_temp = Image::make(URL::asset($output_filename.$type));
//Image::make(URL::asset($output_filename.$type))->fit(250, 150)->save('temp/'.$output_filename.'_desthumb'.$type,100);
$img_temp->fit(304, 150)->save($output_filename.'_desthumb'.$type,100);
$thumb304x150 = $output_filename.'_desthumb'.$type;
$response = array(
        "status" => "success",
        "url" => URL::asset($thumb304x150) 
      );
// saving cropped image to session
//Session::put('image1.cropped',$output_filename.$type);
Session::put($input['order'].'_cropped', $output_filename.$type);
File::delete(public_path(Session::get($input['order'].'_original')));
print json_encode($response);

Any ideas?