Read image from web MATLAB

Question

I have to read an image whose web link is stored in a cell in an Excel sheet. So I extracted the raw data from the Excel sheet using

[num,txt,raw] = xlsread(file);

Then I converted the cell element raw(10,2) that contained the url of the image to a string using url = char(raw(10,2)).

Then I did img = imread(url) but it returns an error.

Error using imread (line 349) Can't read URL "http://the-link-to-the-picture.jpg".

What should I do?