Showing the picture a user just picked?

Our webform has a file upload, and just a regular picture box on it. Now we already have the code to save the pictures and retrieve them, but how would you display the picture they selected without first saving it, then refreshing the page and displaying it? Is this a javascript thing?

Thanks in advance.

Most browsers do not allow this. Filed picked will be submitted with the form, but will not be available to javascript. This is to prevent javascript from having access to local files.

Your best solution is to use AJAX to upload the file, then retrieve it from the server and display it. This solution makes it so the initial view takes longer, but if the user then decides it is the file they want, you can avoid sending it to the server again and just move it from a temporary storage area to a permanent one.

This definitely is not possible with JavaScript. It might be possible with a Flash uploader (but I really don't know Flash). JavaScript does not have any sort of direct access to the host's file system.

On second thought - it might be possible to inject an img tag whose src is a file:// URL. I'm not sure about this, though. Checking now.