When preparing a site for Secure Socket Layer (SSL), it’s been said that you need to use relative paths on the website.
I believe that this is mainly because if you used absolute paths, you would usually throw an http:// in front of the path. Or even if you don’t, you could be pulling the images from an external source that defaults to an unsecure service.
That being said, I was trying to keep paths relative on the php server itself. I know why I was doing it, but if you think about it carefully…doing so does not achieve the same result as above.