Save image using cURL with PHP

Often cURL in PHP is used to download whole webpages, another great use is downloading and saving images.

Using cURL to save images is used over the file_put_content(file_get_contents()) because you can apply more parameters to the request most important being able to set a user agent.

With cURL I can state “who I am” when I make the request for the image.

You can hide your scraping bot and pretend you’re just a regular web user…

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US)");

Or have some fun:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Grabbing image in 3, 2, 1... Thanks");

Obviously a regular user wouldn’t be hitting as many requests in little time as a scraping bot would.

By using

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, 1);

The image is returned as a raw binary string and not outputted.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);

Means no header is in the output.

$fp = fopen($save_as, 'x');
fwrite($fp, $raw_data);
fclose($fp);

Handles the saving of the raw image data into the actual viewable image file.

The full code is:

<?php
$image_url = 'https://website.com/img/1234.jpg';
$save_as = 'img/1234.jpg';
$ch = curl_init($image_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US)");
$raw_data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$fp = fopen($save_as, 'x');
fwrite($fp, $raw_data);
fclose($fp);