How can I improve this PHP code?
<p>I have the php code below which help me get a photo's thumbnail image path in a script</p>

<p>It will take a supplied value like this from a mysql DB '2/34/12/thepicture.jpg'
It will then turn it into this '2/34/12/thepicture_thumb1.jpg'</p>

<p>I am sure there is a better performance way of doing this and I am open to any help please</p>

<p>Also on a page with 50 user's this would run 50 times to get 50 different photos</p>

<pre><code>// the photo has it is pulled from the DB, it has the folders and filename as 1
$photo_url = '2/34/12/thepicture_thumb1.jpg';
//build the full photo filepath
$file = $site_path. 'images/userphoto/' . $photo_url;
// make sure file name is not empty and the file exist 
if ($photo_url != '' &amp;&amp; file_exists($file)) {
    //get file info
    $fil_ext1 = pathinfo($file);
    $fil_ext = $fil_ext1['extension'];
    $fil_explode = '.' . $fil_ext;
    $arr = explode($fil_explode, $photo_url);
    // add "_thumb" or else "_thumb1" inbetween 
    // the file name and the file extension 2/45/12/photo.jpg becomes 2/45/12/photo_thumb1.jpg
    $pic1 = $arr[0] . "_thumb" . $fil_explode;
    //make sure the thumbnail image exist
    if (file_exists("images/userphoto/" . $pic1)) {
     //retunr the thumbnail image url
     $img_name = $pic1;
    }
}
</code></pre>

<p>1 thing I am curious about is how it uses pathinfo() to get the files extension, since the extension will always be 3 digits, would other methods of getting this value better performance?</p>
