You could just redirect to a real image, or read a image file and print that our after content-type: image/png (or whatever).

Image hit counters are not really great though, mining http log files are better when available. Remember to consider concurrent requests and file locking if you write to a file instead of a database, and remember you are counting requests, not individuals. Consider file caching by the browser or proxies (some http headers may help in this case).

tstock