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.

[andy626]

Originally Posted by Kane@airrifle

Bad news, in testing I have found that the image is replace with the PB shakedown thumbnail

Oh crap, disaster!

But a million thank you's for testing this for me!

I think I still need this mod for Tapatalk and Forum Runner, etc.

Does it completely ruin the thread if I was to somehow find a script to find and replace photobucket.com/member/image123.jpg to myforum.com/member/image123 etc.

i.e: is the localised image link still the correct name/folder format of the original image or is the new image name the 3rd party thumbnail image link..... <--- Not even sure that will make sense to you

Appreciate your help though!

[andy626]

This is a bit of a disaster for me and I'm sure hundreds of forums out there surely?

What would be good if you can somehow get members to download their albums and photos off PB.

Then you upload it your server and somehow (???) run an attachment URL find and replace PB.com/member/ to yourforum.com/member/

Once that's been done, you don't need PB and then run this script here for the rest of the 3rd party hosting.

I never knew how vulnerable we are as forum owners when companies can suddenly change their ways and charge $399 per year to show your photos on 3rd party, crazy!

[Kane@airrifle]

This product will only download and replace images in the post table that are between the [img] [ /img] tags so I don't t think it can help you with member profile pics and member albums.

The localised path will be designated by you on setup, you have a choice whether or not to keep the original filenames or to have the mod change them to a numeric value name.

It is a disaster and I am sure there are millions of websites affected. I am pretty glad I installed this mod shortly after Imageshack pulled the same stunt that Photobucket is doing now.

[andy626]

Thanks again kane, I'm running this mod now excluding PB and its working great!

Can't believe I didn't have this on my forum earlier!!!

I'm asking for any help to somehow run an attachment find and replace URL script in this thread below if anyone can help I would be extremely grateful...

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=2588046

[The_Hawk]

I'm in the same boat as everyone else since the photobucket issues. Sadly this mod has been on my todo list for almost a year and I never quite got there

It's now installed and running nicely (excluding photobucket at the moment), although with a shade under 1.1 million posts to trawl through it's going to take a while. I'm on a dedicated box so have pushed it up to 1000 posts per run and it seems to be coping (although I had to disable URL caching as it ran out of memory very quickly).

On the photobucket side there are a range of plugin for Chrome which claim to get around the issue, some are marked as dead already but at lease one is working for me.

While I'm sure that Photobucket will be killing these sorts of work around off as quickly as they can, I do wonder if this sort of approach could be built into this mod, even if it's only short lived, giving us all a chance to pull as many images as we can, while we can.

I have no idea what this would take, but I'd happily put in some $$ for the time it takes to get this up and running.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...alioapbifiaedg

[The_Hawk]

Actually I spoke too soon, the cron job seems to have stopped running for no apparent reason. Even trying to tell it to "run now" seems to not work.

I did hit the "Allowed memory size exhausted" error, but turned off caching... then cleared the iei_img table as well. Still no luck.

I've set the number of posts back down to 10, re-imported the mod, checked the permissions on the folders, rebooted the server... still no clue.

Other tasks still appear to be running automatically or using the "run now" button (which then shows "done"), just not this one.

I can't seem to find any error message anywhere that would point to why this is failing. Any suggestions are welcome.

[The_Hawk]

So I've had a few messages back and forth with y2ksw, which has been brilliant.

The latest advice was the PHP might be silently crashing and wanted more memory. I've been slowly upping the max_memory (as I didn't want to go unlimited just yet) and it's running again. I'm somewhere north of 40,000 images checked so far (excluding photobucket) and I'm currently running at only about 40% of links being found. To be fair this is
2005 - 2011 so it's less of a surprise but really does ram home the need to run a script like this one if possible.

We had this issue in the past with very large images (like 10.000x20.000 pixel) and PHP silently crashing upon insufficient memory. If you are on a dedicated box, you may try to assign "-1" (=any) to max memory. Else, you may try to sign the first unscanned post as scanned to skip over the post which creates this problem.

[Kane@airrifle]

A work around for the PB issue. edit /includes/cron/iei_cron; after line 268 add:

if (is_numeric(stripos($url, 'photobucket')))
    {
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'http://www.photobucket.com/');
    }

I have tested it on a few known blocked PB images and it imports them just fine.

*not my code, was posted elsewhere by "IA1"

[fwulfers]

Thanks so much for this plugin and the code update for Photobucket. I installed in on our forum (vB 4.2.5), made the change to the code and it downloads the PB images just fine. Many tutorials and other important threads will now be useful again.

[y2ksw]

... and most of all, you never lose them again