I tried importing product images into Magento using an absolute path, but it did not work. The image was not uploaded.
For example, I tried importing "http://somewebsite.com/someimage.jpg". The image was not imported.
(I listed the abosolute path on a csv doc and imported using a Profile on the Import/Export screen of the Magento Admin.)
Does anyone know a way to do this?
Roll your own curl program to read the csv and download the images to a local directory. You can do this ahead of time, or try your hand at tricking magento into thinking a local alias to the curl script is a local image.
Magento is hard-wired to only import images from the /media/import/ directory. I think it needs the images to be on it's own server to properly copy them to a new location within /media/catalog/product/. You'll have to either download all the images your self manually and upload them to /media/import/, or write a module that will override some of the core functionality that will get the images and process them properly from an outside source.
you need to edit your phtml files under $magento_dir/app/design/frontend/yourtheme/..//template/catalog/product/view.phtml create a custom attribute of product (ie. absolute_image_url) then edit view.phtml if absolute_image_url is set use it instead product image