I'll be receiving a daily data feed from my wholesaler, which will include location references for thousands of images that reside on their site.

The only thing they told me was to transfer all datafeed information to MySQL. I'll be hiring somebody to do that down the road.

In the meantime, I was wondering if I have to manually save each and every image from my wholesalers website and keep them in a folder in my PC and eventually move them to my site.

It seems to me I would have to have the images to go forward, and since there is no one folder I have access to on my wholesalers site, I must go page by page (they said). A very long job!

Other than giving my database person the daily feed, and my coder/designer all other stuff needed to create my site, don't I at some point have to also hand the actual images folder over that resides on my own PC? Is there another way to do this?

No you just "hotlink" the images to the location on the wholesalers site.

Hi silvergirl,
I agree with chrishirst on hotlinking.
You will want to save the references (links) from the feed into the mysql db, then extract these inside of image tags.
It will be obvious when you look at the feed.

My only option is to steal bandwidth from my wholesaler?

Originally Posted by silvergirl

My only option is to steal bandwidth from my wholesaler?

I wouldn't say it's stealing bandwidth, that would be hotlinking their images and selling somebody else's products.

If they provide the datafeed with the image location, linking to the images on their site is what they intend to you do. That way they stay in control of what image is shown for what product. Many affiliate suppliers and drop ship providers work this way.
Some will provide a downloadable zip file of images for you to use, but the majority (in my experience) don't, and you take their feed and import it.

It's the same if you are a seller and upload feeds to Amazon. Kelkoo, Google base (Froogle) etc, You simply set a image URI on your site in your product feed and the system hotlinks to you.

I understand what you're saying now, but they want me to host the images. Is PHP the solution? Will the person that handles MySQL for me be the person that does this?

I will be getting a data feed every day with new products and some products will not be in stock day by day. I need this automated, so I don't have to check availability on a daily basis, and of course, I would rather not save thousands of images.

but they want me to host the images

In that case you need a system that can pull down the image and save it on your server as it writes the entry to your database

I need this automated, so I don't have to check availability on a daily basis

You need a programmer to write some code that reads the data feed, write new entries to the database, updates existing and downloads the images as needed.

Is PHP the solution?

If that is what your server supports, then it will have to be.

Will the person that handles MySQL for me be the person that does this?

No idea, depends on whether (s)he is a programmer as well.