Saving image from PHP URL

Use PHP's function copy():

copy('http://example.com/image.php', 'local/folder/flower.jpg');

Note: this requires allow_url_fopen

$content = file_get_contents('http://example.com/image.php');
file_put_contents('/my/folder/flower.jpg', $content);

Vartec's answer with cURL didn't work for me. It did, with a slight improvement due to my specific problem.

e.g.,

When there is a redirect on the server (like when you are trying to save the facebook profile image) you will need following option set:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

The full solution becomes:

$ch = curl_init('http://example.com/image.php');
$fp = fopen('/my/folder/flower.gif', 'wb');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);

Here you go, the example saves the remote image to image.jpg.

function save_image($inPath,$outPath)
{ //Download images from remote server
    $in=    fopen($inPath, "rb");
    $out=   fopen($outPath, "wb");
    while ($chunk = fread($in,8192))
    {
        fwrite($out, $chunk, 8192);
    }
    fclose($in);
    fclose($out);
}

save_image('http://www.someimagesite.com/img.jpg','image.jpg');

I wasn't able to get any of the other solutions to work, but I was able to use wget:

$tempDir = '/download/file/here';
$finalDir = '/keep/file/here';
$imageUrl = 'http://www.example.com/image.jpg';

exec("cd $tempDir && wget --quiet $imageUrl");

if (!file_exists("$tempDir/image.jpg")) {
    throw new Exception('Failed while trying to download image');
}

if (rename("$tempDir/image.jpg", "$finalDir/new-image-name.jpg") === false) {
    throw new Exception('Failed while trying to move image file from temp dir to final dir');
}

$img_file='http://www.somedomain.com/someimage.jpg'

$img_file=file_get_contents($img_file);

$file_loc=$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/some_dir/test.jpg';

$file_handler=fopen($file_loc,'w');

if(fwrite($file_handler,$img_file)==false){
    echo 'error';
}

fclose($file_handler);

See file()^{PHP Manual}:

$url    = 'http://mixednews.ru/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/0ed9320413f3ba172471860e77b15587.jpg';
$img    = 'miki.png';
$file   = file($url);
$result = file_put_contents($img, $file)

$data = file_get_contents('http://example.com/image.php');
$img = imagecreatefromstring($data);
imagepng($img, 'test.png');

None of the answers here mention the fact that a URL image can be compressed (gzip), and none of them work in this case.

There are two solutions that can get you around this:

The first is to use the cURL method and set the curl_setopt CURLOPT_ENCODING, '':

// ... image validation ...

// Handle compression & redirection automatically
$ch = curl_init($image_url);
$fp = fopen($dest_path, 'wb');

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
// Exclude header data
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
// Follow redirected location
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
// Auto detect decoding of the response | identity, deflate, & gzip
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '');

curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);

It works, but from hundreds of tests of different images (png, jpg, ico, gif, svg), it is not the most reliable way.

What worked out best is to detect whether an image url has content encoding (e.g. gzip):

// ... image validation ...

// Fetch all headers from URL
$data = get_headers($image_url, true);

// Check if content encoding is set
$content_encoding = isset($data['Content-Encoding']) ? $data['Content-Encoding'] : null;

// Set gzip decode flag
$gzip_decode = ($content_encoding == 'gzip') ? true : false;

if ($gzip_decode)
{
    // Get contents and use gzdecode to "unzip" data
    file_put_contents($dest_path, gzdecode(file_get_contents($image_url)));
}
else
{
    // Use copy method
    copy($image_url, $dest_path);
}

For more information regarding gzdecode see this thread. So far this works fine. If there's anything that can be done better, let us know in the comments below.

Create a folder named images located in the path you are planning to place the php script you are about to create. Make sure it has write rights for everybody or the scripts won't work ( it won't be able to upload the files into the directory).