Any chance for proxy image support for ssl?

[-GR-]

I did a search and didn't see anything. Would really be nice to have the ability to create proxy urls for images posted on the site from other urls. Xenforo I believe implemented something like this about a year ago. I would like to eventually switch over to https but images from other sources is one of the things holding us back. 

[Makoto]

Wouldn't it make more sense just to download and serve embedded images locally?

This would take a bit of work to implement, but it makes a lot more sense.

Proxying embedded images in PHP sounds awful to me personally, assuming I'm understanding what you want correctly. When someone embeds an image into their post, you want your server to work as a proxy for the image to serve the resource over a secured connection?

[-GR-]

Wouldn't it make more sense just to download and serve embedded images locally?

This would take a bit of work to implement, but it makes a lot more sense.

Proxying embedded images in PHP sounds awful to me personally, assuming I'm understanding what you want correctly. When someone embeds an image into their post, you want your server to work as a proxy for the image to serve the resource over a secured connection?

​Yes that is what I would be looking to do. Having it download the image to serve locally would work too. However I am not sure if you could infringe upon any copyright laws doing so.

[Makoto]

Hm, I don't think you should really run into any issues there. Plenty of image hosts allow you to upload images by providing links. You could properly list your domain as the referral for the download request, so if the site has hotlink protection enabled, the user would just get an error when attempting to embed the image. (If the image was hotlink protected, they wouldn't be able to link to it anyways).

It wouldn't be any different than if the user downloaded the image themselves and uploaded it as an attachment anyways, just naturally always respect any takedown requests you receive, though I imagine it should be extremely rare you'd run into any issues with simple embedded images.

(Quite honestly you could argue the same thing about proxying the image anyways, you're still serving the content from your server.)

There are so many reasons why proxying images is a terrible idea though. It's a waste of bandwidth for you and the server your downloading from, it ties up connections to your web server, you're limited by how fast the server your proxying from it, you're likely to end up getting firewalled/throttled from servers by spamming them with large amounts of concurrent connections during peak hours, so on and so forth.

Anyways, I think downloading embedded images locally would be a nice feature to have, but you would probably need to hook it somehow. I think with the new editor it should be possible.