copy file in PHP

I'm tryi开发者_开发百科ng to copy some images from a public website with the PHP function copy(), but this function take too much time, and sometimes I get Maximum execution time Fatal error. I've increased the maximum script running time to 3minutes, but I still get that error sometimes.

I'm curious to know if is there another better/smarter solution for copying/downloading files.

Using curl: http://www.google.com.br/search?q=curl+php+download+image