Your CI login name goes here's take - rakeshraushan/CodeIgniter-1 GitHub Wiki

Externally-hosted images.

Assumptions: your users' photos are on an externally-hosted site; could be a "service" such as flickr, or could simply be another host. Also assume that your users will have a way to "enter" the URL of the remote image.

Solution: store the URL of the user's photos in your site's database.