I'm looking for an answer to a question similar to this one: [protect users' file being accessed so only owner can access?](https://stackoverflow.com/q/6642473/483204)

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> I am writing a web application in php where users can upload their own files or images, but how can I protect these files from being accessed by others other than the owner.
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and the solution which was accepted for this question is ok, so I'll "proxy" requests for files through a special script which will check if a user is allowed to use this file.

BUT I want to do this without querying the DB. So, I guess, it should be possible to detect if a user has access to a file by its location or name.

Because of specific location I can not put all user files into folder with the user id in its name, so I think about file names, *where part of name will contain user id*. So file names can be like this:

**1**\_pic.jpg, **2**\_pic.png, **1**\_pic.gif etc, where the digit at the beginning of the name = user id

Then I'll be able to easily parse the filename, and compare the user id from there with the user id from the session, and check this way whether a user is the file's owner.

What do you think about such an approach, what disadvantages does it have?

Thanks in advance!