image - IMDB Poster URL Returns Referral Denied

Question

In my Ruby on Rails app, I use the imdb gem (https://rubygems.org/gems/imdb) to search for a movie by title and grab the poster url and add it to the movie model I have in my database. Then in my view, I put that url in an image source tag and display the image to the user.

I don't have any problems when I'm running my application locally, but when I deploy it to Heroku, sometimes a few images are rendered successfully but for the most part, they aren't displayed properly. I've tried multiple browsers and as it turns out when I try to load the image, I get a "Referral Denied" message saying:

You don't have permission to access "[poster url here]" on this server. Reference #[some ref. number here]

How would I go about fixing this? I'm guessing it's because the IMDB server is denying my access because either I'm making too many requests from my application or because my application doesn't have the necessary credentials to get the data or maybe some combination of both. Is there a way to bypass this at all?

Answer 1

IMDB blocks the direct linking of images from their site on other sites, I think this previous question covers the topic.

The easiest way to get around this is to download the image and host it yourself rather than linking IMDB's copy. Alternatively you could investigate alternative movie DBs to see if they can offer what you want - the answers to this question on IMDB APIs lists a few. The Movie DB API looks like a good bet.