Image question

PHP's creating an image and I'm trying to store it into MySQL. Instead of raw binary data, all I'm getting is a resource reference. To test this and keep things as simple as possible, I took and created an image with createimagefromjpeg. Here's some example code of what I'm talking about: $url = "http://mysite.com/picture.jpg"; $im = imagecreatefromjpeg($url); Imagejpeg($im); // successfully displays image I'm assuming that $im contains the binary data for the picture and I'd expect to get raw binary output from: echo $im; But I don't... I get "reference #22" instead. How would I go about accessing the raw data in order to store it into the database successfully? Do I need to know anything special about pulling it back out and storing it in a variable? Side note: I know that storing images in a database isn't generally optimal. I've chosen this route because performance isn't an issue and ease of tracking tens of thousands of images is important. Thanks, Ed