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.

[BirdOPrey5]

I'm not using this mod on my 4.2.0 site but honestly being familiar with the code I can't see any reason this shouldn't work in 4.2.0.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Old-Git

Tried in on VB4.2.0 PL 2 this evening and couldn't get it to work at all. The code seemed to run but the Cron job did not. I tried to run it manually and it just hung on a grey screen which said, on upper left corner, VB External Image Importer (or words to that effect). Turned on logging and there was nothing in the logs, tried again, same thing nothing in the logs. FTP to server and looked at the Images/imported folder and seen that it had created 2011 folder and two folders under that one named 01 and the other named 11. Nothing in either folder.

I uninstalled and re-installed, making sure to overwrite, and still the same problem. I tried to uninstall again and this time the uninstall routine hung on a grey screen. Disabled and tried to unisntall and still hung on the grey screen. Diasbled all plugins globally and tried to uninstall, still hung on grey screen. Disabled cron job and tried to unistall and still hung on grey screen. Re-enabled global plugins and then disabled all individual plugins and tried to uninstall. Still hung on grey screen. Finally, re-installed and overwrote (again) and immediately went to uninstall and finally removed it from site. It sounds lovely and now that I can choose which forums I want to include in the import process it would be brilliant if it would work for me.

Incidentally fopen on URL's is on and there's no firewall blocking downloads (I tried your test.php file for google from way back in the middle of this thread....yeah I read the whole thread looking for answers).

Thankfully I was running this on my test rig here in my office and not on my live server so I was'nt worried about all the issues. I'm off to bed now, it's 2:00 am here in the UK, and I'll have another run at this tomorrow.

Rgds

Pete

PS anyone have any success in running it on a 4.2.0 Pl2 install?

Originally Posted by Old-Git

Has no-one go this working on 4.2.0 PL2? Are there any plans to release an upgrade for this hack?

Have you checked the permissions? Please check that the newly created folders have the right to modify (chmod 755 at least) for the server process. If the server can create the folders, but can't assign the rights to change contents, all effords are in vain.

There are currently no plans to upgrade.

[Old-Git]

Just tried it again with 1.0.4. The cron job still doesn't seem to want to run on it's own but when I run it manually it now completes. However, it's not even creating the sub-directories in Images/Imported and obviously it's not touching any of the images at all.

permissions on the folders have been set to both 755 and 777. It simply doesn't seem to want to work on 4.2.0. PL2. I've wasted enough time on it so I've uninstalled it and will come back to it after others have tried and confirmed it works on 4.2.0 PL2.

[warlord0]

Hmm, just working on this and can't see it doing anything. Using 1.0.5 on vb4.2.0 PL2

# ls -l /var/www/forum/images/
drwxrwxrwx 2 nginx nginx 4096 Jul 26 11:46 imported

# ls -l /var/www/forum/includes/cron/
-rwxrwxrwx 1 nginx nginx 16607 Jul 26 11:43 iei_cron.php

Nothing getting created in the imported folder.

I have set it so it only includes forum ID 121 in the options and left the exclude empty.

[warlord0]

Actually it IS doing something.

I query the iei_img table I see it has the newurl and old url, but it isn't fetching the image. If I try the newurl I get a 404.

phpinfo:

cURL support 	enabled
cURL Information 	7.21.0
Age 	3
Features
AsynchDNS 	No
Debug 	No
GSS-Negotiate 	Yes
IDN 	Yes
IPv6 	Yes
Largefile 	Yes
NTLM 	Yes
SPNEGO 	No
SSL 	Yes
SSPI 	No
krb4 	No
libz 	Yes
CharConv 	No
Protocols 	dict, file, ftp, ftps, http, https, imap, imaps, ldap, ldaps, pop3, pop3s, rtsp, scp, sftp, smtp, smtps, telnet, tftp
Host 	x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
SSL Version 	OpenSSL/0.9.8o
ZLib Version 	1.2.3.4
libSSH Version 	libssh2/1.2.6

[warlord0]

All sorted forget I was even here.

I think it all came down to it running the scheduled task before the permissions were correct. Then it wouldn't refetch the image.

After I got a new post with new image up it worked fine.

[BadgerDog]

Donated PayPal to author and been using this terrific mod for a year or so now and it's great !!!

Running 4.1.3pl5 ...

We've come across something weird with it I can't figure out. A member referenced 5 JPG pics (all under 100k in size) using IMG bbcode and pointing to PhotoBucket.

y2ksw's excellent import mod executed it's scheduled task and imported 3 of them just fine ...

FR8002 imported as FR8002-1
FR8003 imported as FR8003-1
FR8004 imported as FR8004-1

It refused to import 2 of them titled:

FR-8001
FR-8005

With the first 3, a typical edit post showed links like this, as they are stored on our own server:

http://www.xxxx.com/images/imported/2012/07/FR8002-1.jpg
http://www.xxxx.com/images/imported/2012/07/FR8003-1.jpg
http://www.xxxx.com/images/imported/2012/07/FR8004-1.jpg

The same edited post shows links to where the two that didn't post as:

http://www.xxxx.com/ (Note: no reference to a pic at all)

There's nothing abnormal about the two pics that this mod fails to process, except they have a "-" dash character as the second character of the filename.

In order to get the pics to show for our member, I had to manually upload for the two of them from PhotoBucket into the imported directory and they display properly in vBulletin doing that. However, all testing I've done with test posts, consistently causes the import mod to fail on these two pics.

Anyone have any idea what's happening?

Is it possible that the "-" in the filename is causing a problem with this mod?

Thanks for any feedback ...

Regards,
Doug

[imported_dfmafia]

Just tested this on my vB 4.2.0 PL2 suite. It's a no-go for all 3 versions.

The cron job never runs. It says it does complete. No scheduled task is run for Import Export Images. Directories have correct permissions.

nothing imported, no scheduled task in the log even if ran manually and it says DONE like it performed its task successfully

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by warlord0

All sorted forget I was even here.

I think it all came down to it running the scheduled task before the permissions were correct. Then it wouldn't refetch the image.

After I got a new post with new image up it worked fine.

I'm glad you have fixed it yourself; all I could have suggested, was to check the permissions

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by imported_df+++++

Just tested this on my vB 4.2.0 PL2 suite. It's a no-go for all 3 versions.

The cron job never runs. It says it does complete. No scheduled task is run for Import Export Images. Directories have correct permissions.

nothing imported, no scheduled task in the log even if ran manually and it says DONE like it performed its task successfully

It surely did compete successfully. The "done" stands for: non syntax errors, no halt, non technical problem. There can be many other issues though, beginning with CURL, fopen & URL's, wrong settings. Many things.

The product is designed to work with most configurations without blocking the board. If nothing happens, please re-check the permissions. Most of the times the problems are permission problems (even though everything seemed ok), but we have had also memory related problems with huge images ... but then it wouldn't arrive at Done

As told so many times before, if Apache (or any other server) can't access the folders for rwx it may however be able to create, nothing will happen. On a Linux environment, Apache should run as www-data (33:33) and jail PHP into a web space. FTP should then have the same access rights as Apache (33:33) and then magically all server problems disappear.

Whenever you have a situation where FTP has different rights than the web server, and the web server rights are not enough, and the rights propagation is not working properly, then nothing will work very well and this plugin fails. Specially in a SAFE_MODE on situation (deprecated for PHP 6+ I believe, thus really should not exist any more on PHP 5.x setups).