Some hosts disabled the ini setting allow_url_fopen. This also means that the ability to easily grab images by calling imagecreatefromjpeg($img) where $img is a url for an external image does not work.

This is a shame as this technique is pretty easy..

$remote_img = 'http://www.somwhere.com/images/image.jpg';
$img = imagecreatefromjpeg($remote_img);
$path = 'images/';
imagejpeg($img, $path);

However I was goin crazy trying to get a product feed integration system to work on a host that has disabled the allow_url_fopen mechanism which meant the above wouldnt work.

Thankfully cURL was still working. So here is the function I made for grabbing and saving an image using cURL instead:

//Alternative Image Saving Using cURL seeing as allow_url_fopen is disabled - bummer
function save_image($img,$fullpath){
$ch = curl_init ($img);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER,1);
$rawdata=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
if(file_exists($fullpath)){
	unlink($fullpath);
}
$fp = fopen($fullpath,'x');
fwrite($fp, $rawdata);
fclose($fp);
}