I've never seen or heard of anything like this but I'm confident that it's been done many times over.

I'm working on an application whereas users can reference their own remote image say.. as an avatar.

Outside of accessing a tool like "wget" is there a way natively for php to grab a remote image and download it to the server for archiving?

<Yes I'm aware of copyright implications but I'm looking for a methodical answer>

Thanks!