Import External Images
 

This vBulletin 4 product imports external images in your posts from external servers or paths into a specific path, normally your forum's image folder.

Differently than the previous product Image Cache for vBulletin 3.x., it parses the posts at regular intervals for new images and replaces the external references in the background. Also, instead of using only a single folder, it creates folders for years and months, making it much easier to handle large quantities of images. The source and destination image URL's are stored into database, too, avoiding unnecessary duplicates.

It moves and optionally converts images from one place to another. It is a handy tool in order to keep your images local to your forums.

Version 1.0.4 is temporarily in BETA stage until the users have confirmed the newly requested features.
Version 1.0.5 is still in BETA stage. It adds a new bunch of additional features, one of which allows you to test your mathematical understanding :) ... and a few other to fine-tune CURL and socket timeouts, and resizing on the fly of too large images. If you don't know what these options do, please leave them at their default values.

Gotta install it now... :)
Thanks...MAI

tagged, thanks,
it uses the forum as referer or the image domain?

Thanks a lot!

thank you

Thanks for coding this as I think it's very useful ... :)

I don't have a development board capability, just a live site with 13,000 members and lots of IMG externally hosted pics, so I'd love to get feedback from folks who install and test this before I try it on our live site ... just in case ... ;)

ps: does it go back and bring in externally hosted pics from OLD existing posts, or just new ones posted from the time forward after the mod is installed?

Regards,
Badger

Tagged! Great mod. I'll try it out later, ;)

Thanks!

So will it go through all past posts and replace those images?

I snap shot would be highly appreciated....!

check this thread , on his own boards
it seems every single image will be hosted on his own server in /imported folder , nice hack , but i really need to switch to dedicated servers before installing this :)

Internally, it skips all images containing $vbulletin->options['bburl'], and, if specified (options), the bburl replacement. Additionally, you may add (options) more folders and/or domains to skip.
Yes, it parses all posts from the beginning.
It has not much to show off - maybe the options window? :)

Why dedicated server? I think it can be run on any normal server.

Thanks ... :)

Two clarifications ...

1. If the image is not longer available on the remote external site, where the poster has moved or deleted it, how does it handle those circumstances?

2. We use a special external reference that ties back to a Highslide display of images we store off-site on a separate special server. The syntax is [HSURL]http://www.pic.jog[/HSURL]. I believe it's BBCode triggered and displays those external pics as pop-ups. We would NOT want those references changes, so does your mod skip those because there are not IMG type tags and it will work fine for us with the HSURL internal code?

Thanks again for your efforts.... :)

Regards,
Badger

1. This depends on your 'Remove Invalid Images' settings (options). Invalid images are also courtesy pages, invalid images (scripts) or anything else which can't be loaded by the image* functions of the GD image library.
2. Please add "www.pic.jog/" to the "Ignore" settings (options) in order to skip all possible image URLs containing this string. If it is BBCode wrapped differently from [IMG] tags, it won't get imported anyway.

Thank you Sir .. :)

So, to the "Ignore" settings I would add "http://photos.imageevent.com" to IGNORE this HIGHSLIDE java script BBCode statement below, which appears in a lot of our posts?

[hsurl=http://photos.imageevent.com/badgerdog/canadianservicerifles/1915rossmkiiisniper223/DSC01967.JPG][IMG]http://photos.imageevent.com/badgerdog/canadianservicerifles/1915rossmkiiisniper223/icons/DSC01967.JPG[/IMG][/hsurl]

Note: there is an IMG reference in that string for the small icon to support the larger pop-up highlside pic, but would it get ignored too, which is important and what we'd need..

Regards,
Badger

The [hsurl] tag won't get parsed, thus you don't have to worry about this tag.

However, if your users are copying and pasting the image contained in [hsurl] in some way, vbulletin would wrap it with a standard [img] tag. For this you should add photos.imageevent.com/to the ignore list, just to make sure it never gets imported, no matter which tag is used.

PS: In order to scratch off the hsurl tag, you probably will need another filter. An URL around an image remains untouched.

Sorry for being so dense .... :D

So, this line of code (or any part of it) on the site would NEVER get touched by your mod when it executes .. correct?

[hsurl=http://photos.imageevent.com/badgerdog/canadianservicerifles/1915rossmkiiisniper223/DSC01967.JPG][IMG]http://photos.imageevent.com/badgerdog/canadianservicerifles/1915rossmkiiisniper223/icons/DSC01967.JPG[/IMG][/hsurl]

Another filter? Such as?

I wish there was some way I could test what this mod does and view it's impact, restricting it's cron execution to just a specific "Test Forum" ID, so it didn't act on any other data in the databse. In that way, we could make sure we didn't mess up 4 years of posts without a test. Is that possible to have a test forum ID mode that one can turn ON and OFF?

Thanks again ... :)

Regards,
Badger

If photos.imageevent.com/ is in the Ignore settings,

[hsurl=http://photos.imageevent.com/badgerdog/canadianservicerifles/1915rossmkiiisniper223/DSC01967.JPG][img]https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2010/11/33.jpg[/img][/hsurl]

is not touched at all. If it isn't, it is touched this way:

[hsurl=http://photos.imageevent.com/badgerdog/canadianservicerifles/1915rossmkiiisniper223/DSC01967.JPG][IMG]http://www.forum.tld/images/imported/2010/11/1234.jpg[/IMG][/hsurl]

Assuming you have already 1233 JPEG images in your .../2010/11/ folder and the post comes from today.

For testing, I suggest to use it on a test board first :)

There is no such filter as forum sections, threads and so on, but if you really must filter, then you may change the query in file iei_cron.php on line 229 from:

$SQL = "SELECT postid, dateline, pagetext
FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "post
WHERE iei_parsed=0
AND pagetext LIKE '%[/IMG]%'
ORDER BY postid";

to:

$SQL = "SELECT postid, dateline, pagetext
FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "post
WHERE iei_parsed=0
AND threadid=XXX
AND pagetext LIKE '%[/IMG]%'
ORDER BY postid";

where XXX is your thread id.

At this point, please enable also the cronjob logging (modify task), in order to see in your logs which posts have been touched.

Last not least, don't forget to undo the changes after testing :D

thanxx

installed but not working at all

you can try it here alra7ba.info

user:vBulletin
pass:123456

can i translate it to Arabic lang. and add it here plzz ?

Installed but for some reason not working. I uploaded the file, created the folder set to 755, enabled the product, not sure what is up.

Changed it to 777 and it works, awesome :)

Does this also convert images posted in articles on the CMS?

Maybe the imported folder needs chmod 777, as stated from a user after your question.

If the plugin creates subfolders and files in the imported folder, it works. Eventually, it will need a long time to catch up to the current posts. On our production board, it took about a week to run through 800.000+ posts, with setting Maximum Post Count: 1000. Please remember, it needs a very powerful server and a long script timeout to run through 1000 posts at each time. Our timeout was set to 5 minutes in the starting phase.

After the plugin had catched up, we set the Maximum Post Count: 10, which suffices for a board with about 1000 new posts each day.

Please feel free and translate/publish the product on your site :)

Thanks for testing. I'll update the help files accordingly.

Are these changes permanent btw? If I uninstall, does it go back to how it was?

Good question, would like to know as well.

This seems to be causing a good amount of database errors.

thank you for your help

i have chmod 777 for folder and i had old version in my vb3.x.x and no new images

that main don't need more time for import images to my site only new posts and that not much :confused:

Changes made to posts and the images stored to the file system are permanent.

As far as I know, articles are not stored in the post table, thus the CMS remains untouched. However, if the articles are stored there, the changes apply.

If it does cause a lot of database errors (timeout, db "went away" errors), please reduce your maximum post count. The default value of 10 should be enough for most boards.

If you have an extremely short timeout on scripts, you will have to reduce this value even more.

If you want to skip all old posts, you may run this query:

This way, only new and edited posts are parsed.

If you decide later to reparse all old posts, too, just run

which will restart parsing all over again.

thank you again sir

try it then inform you about results
BRB

If a post is deleted from the forum, will it delete the images in that post automatically?
I think that is very important for there is no need to keep images from deleted posts .. they only eat up disk sapce.

Also, is there a feature to save the images on another server?
I don't have enough space on my vps , but I have plenty on another shared hosting.

No images are deleted.

If you are on Linux and have direct access, you may define a symbolic link to another server. However, you also will need services, which transfers the requested data back and forth.

I reduced the maximum post count and it worked great! Reduced the DB errors, thanks!

One thing I have noticed, it only replaced images in threads and not in the CMS even if the post is promoted. Any way to address this?

Thanks mate,
If I want to import the images to sub donain ?
like that : static.domain.com/imported

I change the "Imported Images Folder" to ../static.domain.com/imported
the setting of "Remove Invalid Images" on OFF

It does not work for me, it's replace the link of the image to "clear.gif" (Although marked him - not). And not import the file to Sub Domain

Do you have any ideas ?

For now, CMS posts are not parsed. I may consider implementing this feature, if you are not the only one asking for it :)