Best way to recieve image from url?

Hi, I have this function: function saveImageFromUrl($image_url, $image_save) { $contents = file_get_contents($image_url); $fp = fopen($image_save, 'w'); fwrite($fp, $contents); fclose($fp); } As you can see it fetches the images contents and write them to new image on my local directory. Is this is the best way to do this? (I don't have curl) Does file_get_contents() uses buffer to get the contents of the image? (in case the server response is slow) There is a better way? Thanks in Advance, Nitsan