Grabbing images through links

SurgeProto

I have a database that has a bunch of links in it. All of these links are to different picture galleries that I have setup on other sites of mine. I was wondering if it was possible to have php follow the link to the each gallery, then on each gallery page follow the first link to the large image and then save that image to my server. It only needs to follow the first image, not all of them. Anyone help in this area or anyone that could point me in the right direction would be greatly greatly appreciated.

leatherback

Hi,

If it is all on your sites.. Why not just copy them through FTP? Isn't that more efficient?

Unless of course they are not all your sites.

But then you could in theory have PhP open the file which is identiefied bythe url. Subsequently you read through the file, searching for .jpg or .gif strings, grab the whole atg, including size identifiers / open the images and save them on your server.

daveyboy

i would use a script (PHP / python / whatever) to pull the urls out of a database into a text file and feed that to wget. it was made to do this kind of stuff.

otherwise, if you're only going to do this once, grab the files using fopen - it can open urls, too - and use regular expressions to grab the image links from the pages. something like:

'<a href=".+?.gif">'

SurgeProto

The idea of using fopen to open all the urls and pull out all the links to jpgs might just work. How would I tell it to specifically pull only jpgs and how do I get it to save them? Anything more detailed you can give me would be a tremendous help. Thanks a bunch.

agoe

You can't use fopen, fwrite or whatever to save gifs. They have special headers that won't be written with fwrite. With jpegs it's another matter i think. If it is one of these galleries that uses certain algorithms to keep track of the pictures, you could just use copy(), as it also uses the fopen wrappers.

Example: the pics are stored like "galName0001.jpeg or .gif"

you could just loop through the filenames and check whether or not they exist, then copy them over to your ftp-site.

SurgeProto

If I select all the links from my database using a simple query and then loop through them, I could open the URLs one by one. Then, once I find the link to the larger jpg image, I could just place the file into file_get_contents() and save it couldn't I?

The question is, how do I get all the jpg links out of the URL? I specifically only need the first link, but gathering all of them and only looking at the first would work also.

Second, once I place the file link into file_get_contents(), how do I tell it to save those contents?

agoe

I think i would have used copy insted of file_get_contents.

What you could do before you get to the copying, I don't know. Maybe you could pass the url to cURL, and then parse out the filename from the html created using regular expressons. Yeah, I think that is a solution, but if it's a very good one I do not know.