Using Imagecache on external images
Recently we rebuilt a site for a client that was using Flickr to host a whole slew of product images for his website. Now I know what you’re thinking. Hosting images for you website somewhere other than your Drupal install seems a little bit silly, your website now depends on your server being up and it also depends on Flickr’s servers being up. That being said, Flickr does provide quite an extensive API for accessing your images and it’s made even easier with Dan Coulter’s phpFlickr class.
Aside from this though, we wanted to be able push all of the product images through Imagecache in order that we could get consistently sized images for our page layouts.
For those of you that don’t know, Imagecache is a wonderful Drupal module that allows you to define image processing presets (ie scale, crop, colour shift plus lots more). The module then takes your image, processes it according to your preset, and then stores this new copy on the server ready to placed on the page when it is called. This allows you to do some neat things with images without having to upload multiple versions of the same image. You can assign an image an Imagecache preset in various places in the config or you can call it in your code like this:
- print theme('imagecache', 'preset_namespace', $image_filepath, $alt, $title, $attributes);
However, herein lies the problem for us trying to use this on images that we have pulled in from Flickr. Imagecache does not allow you to run a preset on an external image, the image has to be inside your Drupal install. So this is where the fun starts.
We decided to write a function that would go out to Flickr and pull in our images and store them in a folder on our server. And it looks a little something like this:
(Read the inline comments for a basic explaination of what the code does)
- function marmalade_helper_download_from_flickr($flickr_image_id) {
- $flickr = new phpFlickr('6a332a7d86cea24360a71dde09c22c71');
- $sizes = $flickr->photos_getSizes($flickr_image_id);
- //Check if the containing folder exists -- if not, create it.
- $dir = file_create_path() .'/flickr-originals';
- if (!file_check_directory($dir)){
- }
- // Get the image from Flickr
- $url = $largest_available_size['source'];
- //set up the local file name
- $ext = '.' . 'jpg'; // This should get everything after the last full-stop in the above $url, but hardcoding for now
- $src = file_create_path() . '/flickr-originals/' . $flickr_image_id . $ext;
- $result = drupal_http_request($url);
- $src = file_save_data($result->data, $src);
- return TRUE;
- }
- else {
- //if we are unsuccessful then log a message in the watchdog
- watchdog('flickr', 'The image '. $url . ' could not be retrieved');
- return FALSE;
- }
- }
We then wrote a little wrapper function for the Imagecache call which basically checks if the image exists locally, if it doesn’t then it calls the marmalade_helper_download_from_flickr() to go and get it from Flickr. Once the image is down from Flickr, or if it was already there, it runs the Imagecache theme call.
- function marmalade_helper_flickr_imagecache($flickr_image_id, $imagecache_preset) {
- $local_image_url = file_directory_path() . '/flickr-originals/' . $flickr_image_id . '.jpg';
- impact_helper_download_from_flickr($flickr_image_id);
- }
- return theme('imagecache',$imagecache_preset, $local_image_url);
- }
- else {
- return '<span>Image could not be found</span>';
- }
- }
We were then able to print an image on the page by calling this function. All we have to do is provide it with a Flickr image id and the Imagecache preset we want to use.
- $image = impact_helper_flickr_imagecache($photo_id, 'product_page_large');
- print $image;
I hope this helps someone :) Leave a comment and let us know what you think!!
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Typo??
Line 4 of function marmalade_helper_flickr_imagecache
-> impact_helper_download_from_flickr($flickr_image_id);
I think should read:
-> marmalade_helper_download_from_flickr($flickr_image_id);
Not a big deal but it might throw some of your readers off.
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Good stuff and deja vu!
This reminded me of a very similar situation last year where I tried to get the "local copy" functionality for Image Cache's sake into the Embedded Media Field module, which also utilises Flickr (amongst other things) as a possible source.
Hard to beat Flickr as an image manager, eh? Nice solution!
Useful!
Hi guys! This is very useful, as I was looking into such functionality. I'm going to go through the code carefully, and was thinking of integrating it in the node creation/posting process, maybe with a CCK field, which takes a Flickr photo URL and then applies your magic on it!
Soroush < http://sorou.sh >
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