I want be able to upload an image or just paste the URL of an image in order to upload it a sa profile picture for my website users.
the point is i dont wanna store the url but i want to have a copy of that image on my server because if that external image will be lost i dont want to lose it either...
i believe facebook and tumblr etc do so... what the php script or best practice to do that?
thanks!
You can get the contents (bytes) from the image using the PHP function (http://php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php)
$contents = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com/images/logos/ps_logo2.png');
You can use CURL library as well... Here's an example of how you can downloadImageFromUrl with and save it in a local SaveLocation
function downloadImageFromUrl($imageLinkURL, $saveLocationPath) {
$channel = curl_init();
$curl_setopt($channel, CURLOPT_URL, $imageLinkURL);
$curl_setopt($channel, CURLOPT_POST, 0);
$curl_setopt($channel, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$fileBytes = curl_exec($channel);
curl_close($channel);
$fileWritter = fopen($saveLocationPath, 'w');
fwrite($fileWritter, $fileBytes);
fclose($fileWritter);
}
You can use this as follows:
downloadImageFromUrl("http://www.google.com/images/logos/ps_logo2.png", "/tmp/ps_logo2.png")
You can also get the same name of the image by parsing the URL as well...
You can use a function called imagecreatefromjpeg or something. It takes a URL path to the image and creates a new image off of that. Have a look at http://php.net/manual/en/function.imagecreatefromjpeg.php
There's different functions for different extensions, though (if you prefer using such). You may need to check for the image extension from the URL and use the appropriate function I suppose.
Handling uploads is covered in this documentation, and if users paste a URL, I'd recommend using file_get_contents to save a copy of the image to your server, and then you can simply store the path to that image, rather than the external image.
