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.

[Sonik_elf]

1. Go to AdminCP >> Options >> Settings >>vB4 Import External Images and input your settings and enable the addon

2. Go to AdminCP >> Scheduled Tasks >> Scheduled Task Manager >> vB4 Import External Images

3. Edit your settings there and then enable the cron job /scheduled task.

It performs the task, but do not appear in the image folder. What is the problem? Folder have 777 permissions.

Can somewhere view logs or something?

[djbaxter]

Only missing images appear in the image folder.

[djbaxter]

Update:

It appears that the error messages I received and posted above were misleading (at least they misled me). It is not the case that this add-on is finding the same missing image in a number of posts; I thought that initially made sense because the image pointed to a no longer available smiley.

Rather it seems that once the add-on encounters a no longer available image, it gets "stuck" on that image each time it tries to process another run, and keeps generating the same error.

A work-around which appears to be working for me is to add the URL (or part of the URL) pointing to the problem image to the add-on's Ignore list:

AdminCP >> Settings >> Options >> vB4 Import External Images >> Ignore

Ignore
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.

My ignore list now looks like this:

imgcache/
websmileys.com/
/shea0017/
allposters.com/

Now that I'm posting this, I'm not sure what "imgcache/" is - that was prepopulated by the add-on.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

MySQL server has gone away

Nothing we can do about. Server issues are server issues.

Originally Posted by djbaxter

Now that I'm posting this, I'm not sure what "imgcache/" is - that was prepopulated by the add-on.

It's the folder where imported images are stored. Values in this field avoid to import images which were already imported or stored elsewhere by other means.

[djbaxter]

I think you've missed the point. See my latest post above. The add-on gets stuck on a missing image and keeps trying to retrieve it even after it moves on to other posts.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=723

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

I think you've missed the point. See my latest post above. The add-on gets stuck on a missing image and keeps trying to retrieve it even after it moves on to other posts.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=723

We have had stuck image problems in the past, namely out of memory problems with huge images and PHP silently crashing, but then, MySQL would not complain. None of the stuck image problems were solvable by more clever PHP code. And trust me, we have tried hard (a customer paid all the effort but no avail).

All I can say is, when you cannot solve the timeout problems, the plugin does not work for you.

[xyd]

I'm actually strongly considering developing a service for forum owners, as I am one myself, to do what this plugin did (or does, I don't know if it still works) along with a few extra features... all things I've been doing on my forum for a few years but utilizing custom code and not vB plugins...

There's almost nothing I hate more than coming to a forum and reading quality posts from a while back but the images not working in them.

What I've been doing, and the service that I'm considering starting up, would do these things:

1.) Any external images in the past that have been posted to your forum, which are still available, would be imported into my server cluster.

2.) After being imported, the image will be optimized (using lossless - or lossy - the site owner would be able to choose which they would want) using the latest image optimization routines (OptiPNG, etc etc etc).

3.) After being optimized, the old external images inserted into posts on your forums would be updated to no longer route to the external image, but the one on my server.

4.) Files would be distributed to your viewers over our CDN to allow for a better (by not having to wait for things to load) browsing experience.

5.) Any future posts made with external images inserted into them would have them automatically imported, optimized, posts updated and distributed through our service automatically.

The setup would be extremely painless, it'd pretty much be a set it and forget it type thing - everything would be done in the background.

I have a lot of resources at my disposal, but I'd charge around $10/month for access to this service (you can enable it for all of your forums - if you run multiple forums) because there are infrastructure costs if I were to provide this as a service.

Also you'd have the option to have all your normal image uploads (i.e. when someone attaches a jpg to a thread they are making) served through our service as well - the idea here would be to reduce strain on your server, reduce your bandwidth costs and improve browsing experience by faster page loading thanks to the files being served via CDN.

Another thing, and this is still experimental (but I'm implementing it on my forum as we speak), you would have the option to allow us to optimize your images even further, by making it so images that are way too big for the viewer's screen would be resized automatically during the import->optimization phase, into 4 different files (based on the most popular browser screen resolutions), which would not only increase their page loading speed, but decrease their bandwidth used and decrease your bandwidth used. They would, of course, be able to see the image in all it's glory by clicking on it, but the initial view would be sized intelligently (responsive web design). Images would never be upscaled - QUALITY and performance is something I require when it comes to processing images, so you would never see crappy quality images due to our service.

LASTLY, lol, this is still experimental as well (another thing I'm implementing on my forum as we speak), but images could be served as BPGs instead of JPGs/PNGs - more or less this would decrease the file size of images by about 30-40%, saving you and your viewers bandwidth, and making pages load even faster. Should this option be offered, and the forum owner want it enabled, you'd have to stick a piece of javascript into your forum (would all be done via the vB plugin) since BPGs aren't natively supported by browsers yet, but it's well worth doing. I'll post some before and after screenshots once I'm done implementing everything on my own forum.

As I said before, this would be an extremely powerful tool for any forum, there would be hardly any work required to implement it on your own forum. And of course since it would be provided as a service, I'd help anyone who needs it when it comes to installation/configuration.

I'm curious to see what kind of interest a service like this would conjure up - I know if it was around when I created my forum I would have definitely jumped on it for $10/month.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by xyd

I'm actually strongly considering developing a service for forum owners, as I am one myself, to do what this plugin did (or does, I don't know if it still works) along with a few extra features... all things I've been doing on my forum for a few years but utilizing custom code and not vB plugins...
(...)

Sounds challenging

[BadgerDog]

Originally Posted by xyd

I'm curious to see what kind of interest a service like this would conjure up - I know if it was around when I created my forum I would have definitely jumped on it for $10/month.

Nice initiative, but at $120/year, it sounds expensive when this mod does a similar job for the single one time price of a PayPal donation?

If you went ahead, it would also have to be an SSL site..

Regards,
Doug

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by BadgerDog

Nice initiative, but at $120/year, it sounds expensive when this mod does a similar job for the single one time price of a PayPal donation?

If you went ahead, it would also have to be an SSL site..

Regards,
Doug

It surely depends on the service such an add-on may give. Say it is perfect and never crashes, nor has any kind of problems, ever, then $100/yr is not cheap, but in relation to the effort.

The point is that high end servers have a cost which never is paid unless some tricks apply. For example, I was playing with the idea of using flickr and instagram for storing images, taking advantage of a paid account. Then, the service would handle the downloading and redirecting only. But still, a professional service is very costly both in time and hardware.

Personally I prefer a low-end solution and no or little costs, at the expense of sometimes not getting exactly what I want.