I am pulling this out very simply with Spring for a simple HTML page. So I wrote a quick Java program to pull out fields I stored in Phoenix (from the metadata) and I wanted to display the image. I could have streamed it out of HDFS using HDFS libraries to read the file and then stream it.

sql = "select datekey, fileName, gPSAltitude, gPSLatitude, gPSLongitude, orientation,geolat,geolong,inception from dronedata1 order by datekey asc";
out.append(STATIC_HEADER);
PreparedStatement ps = connection.prepareStatement(sql);
ResultSet res = ps.executeQuery();
while (res.next()) {
    try {
      out.append("<br><br>\n<table width=100%><tr><td valign=top><img src=\"");
      out.append("http://tspanndev10.field.hortonworks.com:50070/webhdfs/v1/drone/").
      append(res.getString("fileName")).append("?op=OPEN\"></td>");
      out.append("<td valign=top>Date: ").append(res.getString("datekey"));
      out.append("\n<br>Lat: ").append(res.getString("geolat"));
      out.append("\n<br>Long: ").append(res.getString("geolong"));
      out.append("\n<br><br>\n</td></tr></table>\n");
    } catch (Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
 }

It was a lot easier to use the built-in WebHDFS to display an image. Wrapping the Web API call to the image file in an HTML IMG SRC tag loads our image.

http://node1:50070/webhdfs/v1/drone/Bebop2_20160920083655-0400.jpg?op=OPEN

It's pretty simple and you can use this with a MEAN application, Python Flask or your non-JVM front-end of choice. And now you have a solid distributed host for your images. I recommend this only for internal sites and public images. Having this data publicly available on the cloud is dangerous!

References:

https://community.hortonworks.com/articles/14803/webhcat-and-webhdfs-tutorial.html