Save remote img-file to server, with php

Question

Hi, I want to save a remote img-file to my server, but I don't know how to do.

The image url is http://img.youtube.com/vi/Rz8KW4Tveps/1.jpg and 1.jpg is to be saved and renamed to imgfolder/imgID.jpg

Answer 1

You can use file_get_contents() to load the remote image to a binary string inside your PHP script (file access in PHP often accepts URLs to access remote resources - this is very handy), then store that file somewhere where you have write access. Here is a very simple example:

$image = file_get_contents("http://img.youtube.com/vi/Rz8KW4Tveps/1.jpg");
file_put_contents("imgfolder/imgID.jpg", $image);

Tada!

Answer 2

If the URL stream wrappers are allowed, you can do it in 1 line rather than having to load it into a var:

copy('http://img.youtube.com/vi/Rz8KW4Tveps/1.jpg', 'imgfolder/imgID.jpg');

This is much less likely to cause a problem with PHP running out of memory.