Administrative and Maintenance Tools - 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.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Scalemotorcars

Well Im screwed. I didn't add gallery to the white-list and now all those photos are gone.

My fault for not backing up the db first. You should add a warning (big red letters) about photopost and possible problems.

Once I do get this fixed manually I just want to make sure the info is correct for the hack. All I do is add gallery to the white list right?

Yes. In the option description it says:

Images containing these values are ignored and will not be replaced. Normally you will enter here your media server or gallery folder. Images of your forum and the imported folder are always ignored. Please separate each item by a new line.

It means, if you have a gallery folder, you would add in a new line:

/gallery/

If it is a subdomain or domain:

gallery.domain.tld

If it is ImageShack:

imageshack.

And don't forget to backup your post table this time

[8thos]

What's the point of this mod and can it reduce my First Byte Time in www.webpagetest.org?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Octavius.

What's the point of this mod and can it reduce my First Byte Time in www.webpagetest.org?

The point is: it moves external images to your server. But I can't tell if it is useful to you

[Scalemotorcars]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

I imagine your photopost images weren't readable to visitors and you had not setup the photopost path (mysite/gallery or gallery) into the "whitelist" (Ignore field). So the product tried to download the image but could't read it, and replaced it.

If you have a backup of your post table, you may disable the product and change the INSERT INTO in REPLACE INTO of the queries of your backup (& run a restore of the post table of course), in order to get back what you had, without messing up new posts (since your latest backup).

PS: If you do a restore, make sure not to rebuild the table structure

I only have a complete backup from about 6 months ago and Ive since upgraded from 3.6 to 4.1.4 Is it possible to only use the one table from the complete backup and since its the older version of VB would that be a problem?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Scalemotorcars

I only have a complete backup from about 6 months ago and Ive since upgraded from 3.6 to 4.1.4 Is it possible to only use the one table from the complete backup and since its the older version of VB would that be a problem?

It is a problem, because the database structure has changed. In order to use the backup you would have to restore the backup in a sandbox, upgrade, backup again and restore as indicated with replace into. However there is no guarantee it works, because I suppose you have (had) also other plugins and probably the database structure isn't exactly the same.

[Scalemotorcars]

Yep it has changed.

So to be clear since I would like to use the mod.

in the white list, if my site is root/forum and root/gallery all I need to do is add /gallery/ to the list.

[tommythejoat]

Perhaps I was reckless but I wanted image resizing, so I installed the 1.0.5 version on my test board.

I was not sure from the instructions whether the mod would create the /images/import directory or I would need to do that, so I ran it for a little while without manually creating the directory. The directory did not appear, so I then created the directory with 755 permissions.

I then ran the mod for about an hour and checked the table iei_img to see what was going on. The table shows a number of images have been re-url'd with many going to year based subdirectories and many just being ignored because they were invalid.

However, the /images/import/ directory remains empty.

Here is a translated url from the table

http://mb.nawcc.org/forum/images/imported/2006/11/1.jpg

Are these entries just a "plan of work" and the code actually does the transfers as another background task?

I have turned the mod off by disabling the cron job at the moment

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Scalemotorcars

Yep it has changed.

So to be clear since I would like to use the mod.

in the white list, if my site is root/forum and root/gallery all I need to do is add /gallery/ to the list.

Yes, you would add add /gallery/ to the list. This however may also exclude /gallery/ images from anywhere else ... so maybe it's a good idea to include the domain, too, e.g.:

mydomain.com/gallery/

And please don't forget the backup!

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by tommythejoat

Perhaps I was reckless but I wanted image resizing, so I installed the 1.0.5 version on my test board.

I was not sure from the instructions whether the mod would create the /images/import directory or I would need to do that, so I ran it for a little while without manually creating the directory. The directory did not appear, so I then created the directory with 755 permissions.

I then ran the mod for about an hour and checked the table iei_img to see what was going on. The table shows a number of images have been re-url'd with many going to year based subdirectories and many just being ignored because they were invalid.

However, the /images/import/ directory remains empty.

Here is a translated url from the table

http://mb.nawcc.org/forum/images/imported/2006/11/1.jpg

Are these entries just a "plan of work" and the code actually does the transfers as another background task?

I have turned the mod off by disabling the cron job at the moment

These subfolders are created from the post date of the one they were taken from. The code parses posts one by one and tries to find pasted image references. If it finds one, it creates a new entry ([forumhome][setting]/year/month/progressive.extension) and imports the image and changes the reference in the post. Then it sets a flag to the post in order to avoid reparsing with value 1. Other values may follow for additional services and new add-ons.

If an image was imported previously, it just sets the new reference.

[DaffyDuck]

Doesn't seem to be working for me - vB 4.1.5.

Either the cron task is not running (when running it manually, it completes in an instant), or the code is not working. Either way, none of the images are being downloaded, or the URL replaced.

Any ideas?