Saving thumbnails images to certain directory - php

Question

I'm willing to use thumbnails into my website which is mainly like websites directory.
I've been thinking to save url thumbnails into certain directory !
Example :-
I'm going to use free websites thumbnails service that gives me code to show thumbnail image of any URL as follow
<img src='http://thumbnails_provider.com/code=MY_ID&url=ANY_SITE.COM'/>
This would show the thumbnail of ANY_SITE.COM
i want to save the generate thumbnail image into certain directory my_site.com/thumbnails
Why i'm doing this ?
in fact my database table is like my_table {id,url,image} where i'm going to give the image thumbnail random name and store its new name into my_table related to its url then i can call it back anytime and i know how to do it but i don't know how to save it into certain directory.
any help ~thanks

Answer 1

Using cURL should work for you:
$file = 'the URL';
$ch = curl_init ($file);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER,1);
$rawdata=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
$fullpath = 'path to destination';
$fp = fopen($fullpath);
fwrite($fp, $rawdata);
fclose($fp);

Answer 2

You could use curl to fetch the remote image. You can save it with curl_setopt($handler, CURLOPT_FILE, '/my/image/path/here.jpg');. The id could be something simple like a hash of the original URL. Obviously you'd have to check to make sure the directories exist before you save the file (using is_dir() and creating them with mkdir() if they don't).