Accessing images in a protected directory

I haven't used .htaccess before and am currently having an issue with it. I have a site that has photos from various events on it. Some of the events need to be password protected to view the photos. They enter a password, it gets checked in the MYSQL database and then the php page tries to pull the protected photos from the directory that has .htaccess on it. Yet, everytime it tries to pull an image a username and password dialog comes up. How do I pass this information automatically when I try to get the images so the dialog doesn't come up? Or am I approaching this wrong? Thanks in advance for the help...