grabs an image of another server and displays a resized version.
you can easily make and save thumbnails from remote images this way.

if you use this to just display the image, make sure there is NO output before this script, no blankspace, no nothing or you'll get a "headers already sent" error !

“resize offsite image” makes use of the built-in PHP functions fopen( ), feof( ), fgets( ), fclose( ), imagecreatefromstring( ), imagesx( ), imagesy( ), abs( ), imagecreatetruecolor( ), imagecopyresampled( ), header( ), imagejpeg( ) and imagedestroy( ).

01 <?php
02 
03 // make sure there is NO output before this script, no blankspace, no nothing
04 // or you'll get a "headers already sent" error
05 
06 // the image from another site
07 $off_site = 'http://fundisom.com/supersonnig/nyc/4.jpg';
08  
09 // save thumbnail or display resized image.
10 // leave blank to just show image
11 // otherwise specify the path and name where the thumbnai is saved
12 $savethumb = '';
13  
14 // read binary stream
15 $fp = fopen($off_site, 'rb') or die('Unable to open file '.$off_site.' for reading');
16 $buf = '';
17 while(!feof($fp))
18 {
19     $buf .= fgets($fp, 4096);
20 }
21 fclose($fp);
22  
23 $data = $buf;
24  
25 //set new height
26 $size = 150;
27 $src = imagecreatefromstring($data);
28 $width = imagesx($src);
29 $height = imagesy($src);
30 $aspect_ratio = $height/$width;
31  
32 //start resizing
33 if($height <= $size)
34 {
35     $new_w = $width;
36     $new_h = $height;
37 }else{
38     $new_h = $size;
39     $new_w = abs($new_h / $aspect_ratio);
40 }
41  
42 $img = imagecreatetruecolor($new_w,$new_h);
43  
44 //output image
45 imagecopyresampled($img,$src,0,0,0,0,$new_w,$new_h,$width,$height);
46  
47 // output header
48 if(empty($savethumb)) header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
49  
50 // determine image type and send it to the browser
51 // or save to file if specified
52 imagejpeg($img, $savethumb, 90);
53 imagedestroy($img);
54  
55 ?>