image location hiding techniques

Hi, I have a site with images that I want people to download but not have the direct path to. ie. I do not want them to be able to just view the source, find the dir and then download everything or direct link to them. However I can see no way to do this other than keeping the images on disk, having a php script read them and then spit them out. example: view.php?92348924 where 92348924 is a code that translates to the image on disk. Can anyone think of a better method? If not, what is the most efficient way to do this (ie. avoid the most i/o) Thanks! P.S. I also realize I could use .htaccess to stop direct linking and turn off directory indexes. Still I think there might be some other problems with .htaccess