Never have limits on how many images your site can have again. Image storage is the number one thing that slows down product imports and limits the size and scale achievable by affiliate stores or any large stores.

Or maybe you’re running a large WooCommerce store where you actually sell the products, but you already have datafeeds running against your WordPress site to maintain and update your stock levels. In this case, you probably already have your product images hosted somewhere so that you can import them into your website.

In either of these cases, External Images is incredibly easy to use. Install, Activate, Adjust your import to load images into our custom meta field ‘external_image_url’ (separate images with the | symbol), don’t configure your imports to upload images and then you’re done! The External Images plugin handles the rest.

View Changelog

Image Features

• Works with all post types
• Includes CSS image resizing or Photon on-the-fly image resizing
• Includes full image gallery support
• Supports all WooCommerce product types include images per variation and variation galleries

Note: External Images does not create a gallery of its own – it relies on whatever source of gallery you have – either from your theme or from a supporting plugin which provides gallery CSS and JavaScript. External Images handles everything under the hood to allow your images to stay OFF your site.

Import Speed Boost

The number one reason External Images is superior to other plugins that try to do the same thing is that all of the other plugins we have tested will still upload images to your website first and THEN offload them.

External Images bypasses that – you set a wp_postmeta (custom meta) field called external_image_url with the images for your items and then External Images does the rest. No images ever get uploaded. This massively speeds up your imports, depending on how many image sizes you were creating in the past.

• Speeds up imports – by avoiding importing images, you massively speed up your imports
• Scale to millions of products – with no image storage restriction, you can build stores with millions or even billions of products on low-cost hosting
• Includes support for Datafeedr product comparison tables and preventing Datafeedr from downloading images
• Supports all import tools that allow you to set a custom meta field (e.g. WP All Import + all popular import tools)

Image Hosting

Host your images anywhere on any third party CDN or website and have them loaded directly from that URL, or proxy them through our proxy service, or better yet, proxy them through your CDN for the ultimate in image speed and image control.

Compatible with:

• Digital Ocean Spaces/Droplets
• Amazon S3 image storage
• Google Drive image storage (but not recommended, goes against their TOS)
• Dropbox image storage (but not recommended, goes against their TOS)
• Any publicly accessible image URL which does not have hotlink protection enabled

How External Images works

This plugin alters WordPress and WooCommerce to allow you to use images hosted anywhere on the internet, rather than having to have images hosted on your own server. This massively speeds up imports, but it also makes huge million product or more affiliate stores a real possibility since the storage requirement for your million products is eliminated.

This plugin was originally built to allow users of the Datafeedr plugin to build huge affiliate stores without downloading all of the affiliate images to their website, but you don’t need to be a Datafeedr user to benefit.

It alters WordPress by adding a new custom meta tag to all post types called external_image_url. It then adds hooks and filters to all the various WordPress functions for generating thumbnails, featured images and galleries and replaces that code with code which pulls the images from your external sources.

It works with ALL post types but it also integrates tightly with Datafeedr out of the box and prevents Datafeedr from downloading the images as part of their product set import. It also overrides the other Datafeedr widgets, including the Comparison Sets to ensure they pull images from your external images instead of displaying placeholders.

It’s compatible with any import plugins, including WP All Import so you can massively speed up your imports by importing images to a custom meta field (called external_image_url) instead of as featured images. This keeps images off your server and on the CDN source. This speeds up imports because when WordPress imports an image, it imports multiple image sizes – frequently, this can be 20 or more sizes, and with the External Images plugin the CPU usage that would normally be used to create these size varieties is completely avoided.

You additionally get a new field in the post/product editor below the featured image area where you can view and edit the external image URL, so it can be used without import plugins if you wish.

Image Resizing

We provide two techniques for resizing images directly inside the plugin – through CSS and through Photon Image Resizer (which requires JetPack to be installed).

One question you may have – if you use the CSS approach, doesn’t this mean that full size images are being sent to the archive pages where thumbnails are normally sent? The answer to this question is yes, however, here’s our recommendation:

When you have set up your image hosting, e.g. on Amazon S3 or on a Digital Ocean droplet with a large storage space allocated, or somewhere else, you should ideally configure your images to load from images.yourdomain.com. This is good for SEO.

Then, within your CDN – e.g. Cloudflare – configure their option to resize images on-the-fly specific to the screensize. Cloudflare will figure out what size the images should be and quickly create a down-sized image for you – not on your server – on their Edge servers. This gives you images tailored to your users screen-sizes while eliminating all CPU-intensive image resizing from your website completely.

SEO

As per above, you should ideally make your images be coming from a subdomain of your website, e.g. images.yourdomain.com as this is good for SEO. If you are unable to do this, you can use our proxy cache option inside the plugin so that images are proxied through your server and will appear from your domain. Only the most commonly accessed images will be cached and they will not be resized, so this is still great for your import speed, reducing image storage requirements and avoiding CPU-intensive image resizing.

We also integrate with Rankmath, Yoast SEO and other plugins which generate Open Graph Image tags, e.g. og:image to provide the featured image URL for your page. This image can still come from any third party website, although as per-above, the best practice for SEO is to ideally have it coming from a subdomain of your website e.g. images.yourdomain.com or use our built in image proxy service.

Features

The following features are included in the External Images plugin:

• Use external image URL (e.g. from third-party CDN, affiliate CDN, or anywhere you upload your images) on archive pages (thumbnails), post and product pages and any post type
• Includes automatic code tailored to help Datafeedr users and stop Datafeedr from downloading images when users browse your site – speeds up Datafeedr product imports
• Avoids the need for your server to download images and resize them. Saves disk and CPU and massively speeds up imports involving images.
• Automatically proxies HTTP images (insecure images) through your server if you are running HTTPS. Can optionally proxy all images through your server if you wish. (not really recommended, you should proxy through your CDN instead)
• Integrates perfectly with Datafeedr Product Comparison plugin allowing those images to be external images and proxying them through your SSL/HTTPS if required.
• Includes gallery support – add multiple image URLs to the external_image_url field and this plugin will convert them into an image gallery
• Includes Datafeedr support to check 3 different fields and pull the largest image
• Includes open-graph tags so twitter, facebook and google see your featured images, compatible with Yoast, Rankmath etc
• Includes CSS resizing and cropping so that even though your images are hosted off-site, they will still fit perfectly with your theme. Optional Photon Image resizing too.

Variation Galleries

If you wish to be able to use Variation Galleries, we do support it, however either your theme must support variation galleries (e.g. Kadence) or you must have one of the variation gallery plugins below installed to manage your gallery appearance.

To use the variation galleries, we add an external variation gallery list to each of your product variations. If you are importing, then for each variable product which is a child of another product, you simply import the images to the external_image_url custom meta field (featured image will be taken from the first one you list).

Variation Gallery Compatible Plugins

External Images is compatible with the following variation gallery plugins (and probably more!):

• Additional Variation Images Gallery for WooCommerce (FREE)
• Variation Images Gallery for WooCommerce (FREE)

Theme Compatibility

External Images is compatible with almost all themes directly out of the box. If your theme is not compatible straight out of the box, it means your theme is probably accessing the database directly to grab images, rather than the officially approved way of using thumbnail functions.

In any case, if your theme is not compatible yet, let us know and we will add compatibility specifically for your theme.

Instructions

Upload the plugin zip file using wp-admin->Plugins->Add New->Upload. Activate the plugin.

Now either visit your product pages and enter the external URLs manually, or using your preferred import tool you can import the image URLs to the ‘external_image_url’ field.

For image galleries, insert all image URLs into the external_image_url field separated by the pipe | symbol.

If you are using Datafeedr, External Images will automatically handle importing images to the correct field and avoid downloading images.

Datafeedr Users

Install and activate and now datafeedr will not download images. If you’ve already downloaded a whole bunch of images, you will have to delete these somehow. The easiest way is to temporarily move the product sets to the trash, wait for the products to be deleted and then restore the product sets from the trash and Datafeedr will re-import the product details, this time without the images.

Visit any archive/shop/product/post page where there is no featured image, and if you look at the image source you will find it’s coming from the affiliate CDN, and not from your server.

WP All Import Users

Install and activate and then in your import, import image url(s) to a new custom field called external_image_url separated by | symbol. Select the option “Don’t import images” and then run your import. Your import will run far more quickly since WordPress is not downloading and creating multiple sizes of your images. Instead, it’s simply populating the external_image_url field.

Visit any archive/shop/product/post page, inspect the images and you’ll find they’re coming from your external source.

Note: The field for imports for featured images, galleries for all post types including product variations is external_image_url – it is NOT the hidden field with the preceding underscore (that is for our internal use).

Manual use

Visit the post/product editor page and below the featured image you will find an external image URL field you can edit. If you place an image URL in here, WordPress will display that image for your thumbnails and featured image instead of storing images locally.