What are common methods for downloading images from external servers using PHP scripts?

Downloading images from external servers using PHP scripts can be achieved using methods like file_get_contents() or cURL. These functions allow you to fetch the image data from a remote server and save it locally on your server. This can be useful for displaying images on your website or processing them in some way.

```php
$url = 'https://www.example.com/image.jpg';
$image = file_get_contents($url);
file_put_contents('local_image.jpg', $image);
```

In this code snippet, we first specify the URL of the image we want to download. We then use file_get_contents() to fetch the image data from the remote server and store it in the $image variable. Finally, we use file_put_contents() to save the image data locally as 'local_image.jpg'.