Grab an image dynamically?

retrotron

Is there a way to dynamically grab an image (from some public domain image site) and insert it into one of my own pages?

I would like to grab public domain unrestricted images from the US national archives dynamically. The images I'm after can be found here:

http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/basic_search.jsp

(select the 'limit results to 2000' radio button, check the 'descriptions of archival materials linked to digital copies' checkbox, then search for 'corporation').

I'd like to randomly select an image from these search results, along with the image title/description, and so forth. I'm not sure how to do that all with a PHP script, or if its even possible.

Anybody have any ideas?

onion2k

It'd be about a billion times easier to do if you copied the images and details you want to your own server..

rehfeld

you can grab files with file_get_contents() or fopen(), they work with urls

study up on regular expressions, they will be usefull to parse the title, description, and image location out of an html page,

retrotron

I figured as much. Oh well, I guess I'll have to find another public domain image site easier to pull random images. Anybody know of any sites holding free, up-to-date corporation news images?

onion2k

They're all going to be difficult to automatically take images from. The problem lies in the fact you're going to have to parse someone elses HTML to find the URL of the images, and then quote that into your code. While thats not immensely hard to do in itself, the problem arises in doing it in such a way that it won't immediately fall to bits if the site you're taking pictures from changes at all.

retrotron

Makes sense. Perhaps I should stick with RSS feeds. That's dynamic, up-to-date, and maintains a consistent structure, albeit no images.

ShadowMetis

It's fine to grab the images from those pages. The code is a little complex but it's very rewarding once you get it. It's like that with any programming. If you're willing to do the work, it's very beneficial.

retrotron

Well, just for curiosity sake, how would I go about getting an image from the site mentioned above?

I can load a URL and parse the contents, but I can't figure out how to get to the proper URL in the first place. There's not a static URL for those pages above, instead the search results are served up via JSP. In order to get to the pages with those images, I have to submit a search and then get the results from the resulting page. I'm not sure how to do that all from a PHP script.

rehfeld

if
example.org/image_search.jsp

is the page you search from, look at the form fields, note the names, the action location, and the method

for example, if the form submitted to
example.org/results.jsp
and used method = get

you could prob get the html results by doing

$html = file_get_contents('http://example.org/results.jsp?search_terms=apples');

if it uses method = post,you will want to take a look at fsockopen() and/or php.net/curl

retrotron

Yeah, it uses POST, which is why I didn't think a pure URL would work. Cool. I'll check out those methods.