The "src" attribute on an <img> tag should be set to the URL of the image. You appear to be trying to set it to the actual binary contents of the image. That won't work.

What you need to do is to set the "src" attribute to point to a CGI program which returns the image data (in much the same way as your existing get_thumbs subroutine does.

Update: Actually, it's worse than that. I'm not sure what you expect to see in the $get_image variable as your get_thumbs function doesn't return anything. But it _does_ print a CGI header and the image data to STDOUT, thereby taking precedence over anything printed by your main program - which explains why you just see the image and nothing else.