Options for reading a remote directory

I have a script that displays images based on certain conditions. When none of the conditions are met, I want to randomly display one of the standard (backup) images. Those other images are on a remote server. I have read that you can't read a directory on a remote server, which makes sense.

Is my best bet to place a file into the remote server's image directory that outputs all of the image file names so I can parse it with the other server? Is there an easier way?

I prefer not to use FTP (http://php.net/manual/en/book.ftp.php).

What are my options for basically just getting the names of the images in that folder?

Thanks, Ryan

UPDATE:

@mario's answer is lightweight and works like a charm. It is exactly the solution I thought I wanted, but after thinking about it some more, and reading that even @mario would do it differently, I decided to go with @bensiu's answer, because to me, control and security are more important than convenience. With @mario's method, it's very hard to know if the data you're getting is any good (lack of control) and you're exposing your directory / some server information (security). @bensiu's suggestion involves a second file (inconvenience), but provides the control and security I'm ultimately deciding to go with!

Thank you both!

-Ryan

I would prefer an exact and dedicated handler script like @bensiu pointed out.

But an alternative would be to read out a directory listing. A simple Apache generated mod_index listing would be sufficient for:

$html = file_get_contents("http://example.com/images/");
preg_match_all('/<a href="([-\w\d.]+\.(jpeg|png|gif))"/', $html, $uu);
$files = $uu[1];

I hope you at least have access to remote server...

You can place there script "A" that will do the job locally, return list of images in preffered format ( raw text, JSON, XML... ), and this script will be remotly called by curl form your server....

It also wise to make sure that when you call script "A" you at least passing some secret key to prevent unathorised access (not perfect solution but could be enought)

if you have PHP5 and the HTTP stream wrapper enabled on your server, it's very easy and simple to copy it to a local file:

copy('http://somedomain.com/file.jpeg', '/tmp/file.jpeg');

ome hosts disable copy() function then you can make your own -

<?php 
    function copyemz($file1,$file2){ 
          $contentx =@file_get_contents($file1); 
                   $openedfile = fopen($file2, "w"); 
                   fwrite($openedfile, $contentx); 
                   fclose($openedfile); 
                    if ($contentx === FALSE) { 
                    $status=false; 
                    }else $status=true; 

                    return $status; 
    } 
?>