Image filenames as URLs

[GiganticDays]

I receive a data feed from one of my suppliers which constitutes a significant portion of my online store. This is very convenient as it only takes a little tweaking in Excel and it's ready to import into Actinic - great so far. My (growing) problem is with images; currently I use a folder into which I initially downloaded their entire image library (with permission of course), and I update this manually as new products are added. While this results in an ever-expanding image folder and many duplications, it is do-able. Problem is, the supplier is in the process of stopping the image library dowload service and replacing it with various methods of "calling" images via perl, java, shell or php scripts. My knowledge of these things is limited to say the least, and suspect it requires a level of access to the server which we do not have. There is an alternative which involves the image file expressed as a URL which "calls" the image from their own site, but Actinic will not accept a URL as a valid image file since it doesn't have a valid extension. An example of the URL is:-
http://www.midwich.com/services/g.ph...code=XXX%20XXX

Sorry but I can't seem to get that to display as anything but a link.
Can anyone help with this?

[jont]

Have you tried simply using a CUSTOMVAR and inserting the URL into the property tab against each product as required? I am assuming you are hot-linking through to the suppliers webspace?

[GiganticDays]

Jont
That doesn't seem to work; it only displays the text of the URL rather than the image it calls. I've probably got the CUSTOMVAR setup wrong - I've called it IMAGECALL, given it a value of the URL with account number and postcode inserted. Then I modified the Act_Productline template by replacing NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTIMAGE with CUSTOMVAR:IMAGECALL. All I got was this:-

[GiganticDays]

Just as a follow-up, I'm not sure that this would be the way to go anyway as I import around 6000 items from a csv file and there doesn't seem to be any way to automate the CUSTOMVAR that I can see, it would appear that I would need to manually edit each individual item.

[GiganticDays]

Sorry, I'm a bit of an idiot; I've managed to get the hotlinking thing working (forgot to put in img src=). So if I can automate this for importing from a csv file, I'll be sorted...

[NormanRouxel]

Be careful if you intend to have your Product pages using SSL. Having images from a different server will lose the golden padlock display.

[GiganticDays]

Thanks for the warning Norman, but I only use SSL during the order process. I don't think hotlinking is the way to go anyway; I'm going to speak to 1and1 about getting more access to the server in order to execute one of the scripts used to download and store the image files. Probably means upgrading my package though.