Having read your code and quickly brushing up the little bits of PHP knowledge from years ago, I'd say it helps only a little. mysqli_real_escape_string alone doesn't protect you completely from sql injection attacks, it just makes it harder - see the second answer at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5741187/sql-injection-tha... for an example. Also, the homegrown $albumID validation allows bad payload to reach mysqli_real_escape_string().