Okay I will try to explain: First you can upload the images, is that correct?

If you have an image named:

ace.jpg

The idea is assign a unique name to it, some people might give a unique generated number after the name like.

ace500.jpg

My technique adds the user id to the image:

ace500_125.jpg

So you have image name + however you assign a unique number + _ + userid.

You make a route:

Route::get('image', 'ImageController@displayImage');

You make a controller:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Request;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Session;
use App\Helpers\Clnsantize as Cln;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Auth;

class ImageController {

    public function displayImage() {

        $basedir = storage_path('app/upload');  // adjust to your needs.
        $imagedir = Request::input('dir');
        $image = Request::input('img');
        $string = $image;
        $str = (int) Cln::getBetween($string, "_", ".");

        If (Auth::id() != $str) {
            exit(0);
        }

        $file = $basedir . '/' . $imagedir . '/' . $image;

        header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
        ob_clean();

        readfile($file);
        exit(0);
    }

}

And to use

<img src="<?php echo 'http://localhost/laravel70/image?dir=imgdogs&img=' .  $row->dogpic; ?>" alt="" class="image">

I added a string helper to get id:

    public static function getBetween($string, $start = "", $end = ""){
    if (strpos($string, $start)) { // required if $start not exist in $string
        $startCharCount = strpos($string, $start) + strlen($start);
        $firstSubStr = substr($string, $startCharCount, strlen($string));
        $endCharCount = strpos($firstSubStr, $end);
        if ($endCharCount == 0) {
            $endCharCount = strlen($firstSubStr);
        }
        return substr($firstSubStr, 0, $endCharCount);
    } else {
        return '';
    }
}

Now the image will display if the logged in user id matches the image id.

The url is

http://localhost/laravel70/image?dir=imgdogs&img=ace500_125.jpg

The user can right click, view image, download, etc.

Now if another user with id 55 or whatever ...

is logged in, they cannot serve (view) that image. Even if they somehow guess and put:

http://localhost/laravel70/image?dir=imgdogs&img=ace500_125.jpg

in the address bar, they get nothing.

I am not saying to use this, your choice. I also shared two other links that you can look at.

My technique or one of the others, adjust as necessary for admin to also have access to.

Edit: You are just storing image name, what if another user had an image with the same name.

The gist I gave shows one way to get a file name, but use whatever technique you like.

You could just use file name + _ + userid.

But look over https://medium.com/@amycancode/protecting-user-uploads-in-laravel-611b62e6bb0e

and https://laravel.io/forum/04-23-2015-securing-filesimages#23498 also.

If nothing here works for you, you might consider another host as suggested by @bobbybouwmann

symlink() has been disabled for security reasons

ace.jpg

ace500.jpg

ace500_125.jpg

Now if another user with id 55 or whatever ...