Using an external image and resizing it

[thomas]

Hello everyone,

I'm new to Process Wire and I'm trying to set up a website for a magazine. My first task was to import a bunch of videos from another site into PW and it actually worked out quite good. Now I've got a bunch of pages with an external image reference in the image field. My idea was *not* to copy the whole lot of images, but to download and resize the ones that are requested. The first naiive attempt was this:

<img src="<?=$article->video_image->size(350,88)->url; ?>">

With 'video_image' being a full path to an image on another remote server.

Soo ... that didn't work. Do I need to copy the image to my server before resizing it? Or is there a trick to resize it and save only the "new" image on my server?

Thanks for any help! Loving PW so far!

thomas

[ryan]

Welcome to the forums Thomas. It's not possible to physically resize an image on another server, but you certainly can resize it with CSS or width and/or height attributes in the <img> tag. But if you want an image you can physically manipulate, then it has to be on a file system that ProcessWire can write to. You can tell ProcessWire to pull an image from another server like this:

$page->video_image = 'http://domain.com/path/to/file.jpg';
$page->save();

Once you've got the image in there, you can resize it like in your example. I'm assuming from the non-plural name 'video_image' that you've defined the field to only hold 1 image rather than many. Though the snippet above should work either way.

Note you may need to add a $page->of(false); before the code example above if you are executing it from a template file. ProcessWire delivers pages to templates in an output-ready state where entities are encoded and such (something you wouldn't want when saving a page). So you just have to disable output formatting to put the page in a state where it can be saved, otherwise ProcessWire will throw an error. This isn't usually necessary in other API contexts, outside of template files.

[MarcC]

Timthumb supports external images via a whitelist. I haven't used it with ProcessWire before, but could probably try that, too.

[thomas]

Hello Ryan,

thanks for the quick reply. That's pretty much what I did (I have a module pulling JSON data of the video server). My error was, that 'video_image' was a text field and not an image field!

Thanks for the great work,

thomas