declaring path variable

I am working on a theme and on a page I have declared the path variable as
$path = "http://localhost/".base_path().$image_gallery['filepath'];

which gives the location of the new image gallery. Now, I want to remove the http request to the localhost, but when I declare it as
$path = base_path().$image_gallery['filepath']; it does not recognize and does not display the new image galleries.

can you tell me how shoud I declare the path variable.

thanks.

Moved by VM