FOPEN For Getting Images From Another Site

I tried this the way I thought it would work without any success. I need to copy thousands of images form our suppliers' web site to our retail web site. They've given us permission to do so, but won't let us do it any simple way (FTP, sending us a CD ROM or ZIP disk, etc). I'd like to save a day of headaches by writing a PHp scrip tthat will read the filenames (which I already know) and save them on my server. I tried using this method to read them: <? $filename = "http://www.theirsite.com/graphics/imagename.jpg"; $fd = fopen ($filename, "r"); $contents = fread ($fd, filesize ($filename)); $x = filesize($filename); print "x = $x<BR> $contents"; fclose ($fd); ?> x (the filesize) came up as null value and it didn't display the contents. Am I dreaming, or is this possible? Thanks, Jeff