Check If Remote Images Exist Php

I'm using the last.fm API to get the recent tracks and to search albums and artists etc. When images are returned from the API, they sometimes doesn't exist. An empty URL string is

Solution 1:

You can use getimagesize since you are dealing with images it would also return mime type of the image

   $imageInfo = @getimagesize("http://www.remoteserver.com/image.jpg");

You can also use CURL to check HTTP response code of am image or any URL

$ch = curl_init("http://www.remoteserver.com/image.jpg");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_exec($ch);
if(curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE) == 200)
{
    // Found Image
}
curl_close($ch);

Solution 2:

Depending on the number of images and frequency of failures, it's probably best to stick with your current client-side approach. Also, it looks like the images are served through Amazon CloudFront - in that case, use the client-side approach because it could just be a propagation issue with a single edge server.

Applying server-side approach will be network intensive and slow (waste of resources), especially in php because you'll need to check each image sequentially.

Solution 3:

Also might be useful check the request headers, using get_headers php function as follows:

$url = "http://www.remoteserver.com/image.jpg";
$imgHeaders = @get_headers( str_replace(" ", "%20", $url) )[0];

if( $imgHeaders == 'HTTP/1.1 200 Ok' ) {
    //img exist
}
elseif( $imgHeaders == 'HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found' ) {
    //img doesn't exist
}

Solution 4:

The following function will try to get any online resource (IMG, PDF, etc.) given by URL using get_headers, read headers and searching for string 'Not Found' in it using function strpos. If this string is found, meaning the resource given by URL is not available, this function will return FALSE, otherwise TRUE.

functionisResourceAvaiable($url)
{
  return !strpos(@get_headers($url)[0],'Not Found')>0;
}