Cache Hotlinked Image To Minimize Server Load

Before anyone rips me a new one...I HAVE PERMISSION to hotlink images from an external site. It works all good, however I don't like that everytime i refresh the page it pulls the images again. My server is running PHP, is there a way to cache the images once, then display them via some local code. I'm really just looking for a way to speed up the开发者_运维问答 page, and not waste anyones bandwidth. Thanks in advance.

I was looking for an answer to this myself and didn't find anything that fit my needs perfectly. TimThumb came close (you'll have to Google it; I'm a newbie and can thus only post one hyperlink), but it was a little overkill (it has all kinds of image manipulation stuff built-in) and couldn't handle some of the image types I was interested in using (specifically *.ico files). So I wrote my own quick-n-dirty PHP script that should handle any image type and is only concerned with caching the images alone and passing them through without any modifications.

I'm a bit concerned my script may have glaring security flaws or could be more efficient. Also, it's not very smart the way it caches. It never bothers to check later to see if the image has been updated, and it never bothers to clean up its own cache. If anyone has suggestions for improvements to my code, I'm open to feedback.

Here's the script: Warm linker - RefactorMyCode.com

You might consider using a proxying CDN like CoralCDN.