Question

I just go through Google search before posting this question here but I am not happy with my Google results. I hope someone can help me here.

I have an eCommerce site. All the images are stored in a different ftp server. I need to show all the images on my webpage. When page laods it ask for FTP username and password. I can avoid it by giving username and password in FTP URL. But I do not think it is secure. My password will be accessible to every user of my site.

Is there any other way?

Answer 1

You really should create an FTP account that only has access to the folder with the images on your FTP server. Do that as soon as possible.

For a better overall solution, either synchronize the images to your webserver, or write an HTTP handler that will fetch the image server-side and streams the bytes to the client as if the image was on your server. Have a look at System.Net.FtpWebRequest for the second solution.

If you have write access to disk on the web server, you could implement both parts of the solution. So if an image is fetched the first time, write it to disk before sending it to the client. The next time it’s requested, simply redirect the request to the image on disk (or dynamically change the URL of the <img> tag for that product). This way, you build a cache of the images on your web server as time passes. Of course, you need to be able to invalidate the cache in case an image is updated.