How to retrieve a photo from picasa as binary image

Question

Ok, so I am working with the plain Picasa API in PHP. (Not zend, just http calls). I am authenticated and can browse through albums and select photos.

The problem I am facing now is that I have a URL where a picture exists and I want to retrieve that picture's binary data with php. So far I have tried the samples below, but none of them downloaded any data.

$url = 'https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-T4v5svsA3JU/Tc7jEchmSYI/AAAAAAABAb8/MLXlXjKUyIg/s1024/Dies09_080509_5144.JPG';
$file = file_get_contents($url);
echo $file;

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 15);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $data;

So, how can I retrieve the binary data of a photo from Picasa?

Answer 1

What kind of error did you get when using the first method? I've tested the code below and it works properly for me. This will output the image resized to a width of 250 px.

$url = 'https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-T4v5svsA3JU/Tc7jEchmSYI/AAAAAAABAb8/MLXlXjKUyIg/s1024/Dies09_080509_5144.JPG';
        $file = file_get_contents($url);
        $im = imagecreatefromstring($file);
        $im = imagescale($im, 250);

        header('Content-Type: image/jpg');
        imagejpeg($im);