Help with External Images

[kclovis]

My distributor provides image urls for the products on my site. And they also allow hotlinking. How do I make the hotlinked images appear in place of the default image location?

Thanks!

[kclovis]

ok... so i guess there's no help for this? dang...

[yellow1912]

There are several reasons not to do that:
1. You dont want your customers to know of your distributor.
2. What if their host is slow (it can happen from time to time), it will slow down your site.
3. What if their host dies (again, it can happen from time to time), the images will not be displayed on your site.
4. What if certain products are out of stock there, and they decide to delete those?
.....

If you still want to hotlink their images after that, you will have a hard time rewrite code.

[kclovis]

I'll take my chances with all of the above. They don't host the images on their domain. They have a separate domain for the images so it's anonymous.

They also have a datafeed for discontinued products. I understand all that you're saying and I appreciate your input, but I just need to know how to hotlink through to their images.

Is there anyone that knows how to do this that can give me some direction?

[yellow1912]

You will need to change the way zencart stores your image when you insert new products. You will also need to change the way zencart generate links to these images when displaying them on the site. If you use certain mods such as Image Handler 2, you may need to make further change for them to work correctly.
Does it actually worth it? Are you try to save space or bandwidth?

You should have some good knowledge of PHP and ZC to do this.

[kclovis]

Well the reason is that the data file that the distributor has provided is too difficult to parse. I cannot extract the filenames from the url because some of the products are behind multiple directories and there is no real organization to it. The catalog is over 6,000 products and that's just too much to do one by one.

So in a nutshell, I guess I'm going to spend my time working to either parse the data to extract the filenames or to figure out how to change the php file.

Thanks so much for answering me!