What are the potential pitfalls of using imagecreatefrompng and imagecreate functions in PHP for creating images?

One potential pitfall of using imagecreatefrompng and imagecreate functions in PHP for creating images is that they may not handle errors or invalid input gracefully, leading to potential security vulnerabilities such as remote code execution or denial of service attacks. To mitigate this risk, it is important to validate user input and sanitize it before passing it to these functions.

// Example of validating and sanitizing user input before using imagecreatefrompng and imagecreate functions
$filename = 'image.png';

// Validate the file extension
if (pathinfo($filename, PATHINFO_EXTENSION) !== 'png') {
    die('Invalid file format. Only PNG files are allowed.');
}

// Sanitize the input by using realpath to get the absolute path
$filepath = realpath($filename);

// Create image from PNG file
$image = imagecreatefrompng($filepath);

// Proceed with image processing
// ...