Product images via URL?

[yongkoom]

Hello,
I have searched everywhere for an answer to this, but cannot seem to find anything on it.

All the images for my store are located on a remote server with no convenient way to download them in mass. I have a very long list of products in my store (6000+) and rather than trying to add them to my store 1x1, I am wondering if there is a way to display the product images in my store via URL rather than placing the images into my images folder.

For example... if my store were located at abc.com, I would like to pull the images from xyz.com/images/ and have them display in the same way they normally would.

Does anyone know a way to do this?

[kobra]

And then what happens to your site when xyz.com goes down???

[yongkoom]

Hehe... good question Kobra. I guess the answer is pretty obvious, but at this point that seems less of a concern to me than trying to download 6000 images 1x1 and then re-uploading to my server. If it only took me 1 minute per down/upload, I would be at it for 100 hours or more!

I realize that this is a less than optimum solution, but what else can I do?

[kobra]

Obtain temp FTP to the /images dir through the other site
6,000 is not that many as I have a client with 75,000+ base images and downloaded them all in little time

[yellow1912]

Unless you do not have access to the other site. That raises a question: do you have the permission to use those pictures at all?

[EBTown]

You could use a website downloader, to download the images and re upload them via ftp. This process will still require a lot of time to complete but should be relatively automatic.

[yongkoom]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. Yes, I do have permission to use the images, but have no FTP access to retrieve them. If it were that simple I would not have posted here. I am afraid that if there is no way to achieve my original goal of using a URL to display the images, then EBtowns suggestion may be my only solution. I have actually tried several website ripping programs for this purpose already, but most dont seem to work too well. Any suggestions on what is a good site ripping program?

[realizingthedream]

What was your solution. I have a datafeed fi;e with over 3000 urls...how do i upload into my store