Question:

In order to have the administration of a website to be performed from a different server from the one where the website is hosted, the problem of dealing with remote images arose.

Common Problems:

• Check if the image actually exists before creating links to it;
• When replacing a certain image, check if the previous one exists so that it can be deleted;
• Check that the image uploaded to the server does not have the same name as an existing image.

Normally, this type of operation is performed with is_file() , but as it does not support URLs, only absolute or relative paths of the server itself, it is therefore unfeasible for this scenario.

Question

Using PHP, how can I check if a remote image exists?

Answer:

For that you use file_exists , in addition to remote URL it works with absolute or relative paths of the server itself, like this:

    if(file_exists('http://www.dominio.com/imagens/minha-imagem.jpg')){
       //seu código...
    }

other useful functions are:

• is_readable – Tells if the file is readable.
• file – Read the entire file into an array
• file_get_contents – Reads entire file to a string (extremely useful)
• fread – Binary-safe read from file
• readfile – Reads and displays the contents of a file