Displaying per-feature images on map

[Bill Binko]

Hi everyone,

In my quest to do weird nasty things with mapserver (which is being very
tolerant BTW), I've come up with a new one.

I'd like to display images on my maps next to the features they go with.
Basically, I have a set of points in a postgis database with an attribute
which is a URL to a JPG (I can convert them to PNG or anything else).
They are mostly about 337x394 pixels. Some are up to double that - I can
resize them to match if needed.

I have the images on another machine accessible via http, and I'd like to
leave them there since they update via a separate process.  (I have a
caching script setup w/Apache so only the first fetch will go over the
network.)

So, I considered using GDAL's Virtual support, but I don't know if it
needs local images, and I think it needs GeoTIFFs or the like: these are
just plain images.

I also considered updating the mapserver code to use a different image for
each shape.  However, those filenames are local as well, so I'd have to
add code for fetching them image via libcurl.

Generally, I don't see a simple solution.  Perhaps I could write a
GDAL Dataset that will fetch images from a URL on demand?

Any thoughts would be appreciated,
Bill