Storing images on a different server?

[OwenB]

Hi

Is it possible to make a configuration change so that all new images added to the database are stored on a different server.?

My zen-cart currently runs on digi-books.org.uk but we are migrating to an unlimited host at digi-books.org.

So what I am asking is when we add an author or a book cover can that be stored on the latter server automatically?

Thanks in advance

[DrByte]

Unfortunately it's rather complicated to do that.

Zen Cart dynamically detects what product/category images are available, including small/med/large sizes, based on what files are present in the server's actual filesystem. Hosting the images externally means it has no insight into what's available.

To do it would require rewriting all the image-related code to ignore all the optimizations that it currently handles, and rely strictly on a URL to an external image, regardless of that image's dimensions or resolution or suitability.

Can it be done? Sure. You have full control over the code on your server, so you could add a image-url field to your product table in the database and then everywhere all your template files produce an image you can use that stored URL instead. Many of the template files rely on the image-related lookups happening before the template is called so you'd need to edit/replace that code in the header_php or main_template_vars.php files for every page.
Alternatively you could intercept the usual image-related code by declaring a custom handle_image() function that handles all the lookup/retrieval logic for your specialized image processing. Keep in mind that you'll need to do some fancy stepping to assess what kind of image is being requested in order to lookup the proper external image you're trying to load (size, dimensions, resolution, etc) to replace what Zen Cart does dynamically when looking for multiple-sized images directly on the filesystem.

[mc12345678]

@OwenB,
Since there is this migration occurring, am I correct that at some point what would now be considered a remote server would become the local server?

Or was the thought to always "split" this information so that images remained on the one server while the store remained on the other and migration would be more of a data storage situation?