diff --git a/sorl/thumbnail/conf/defaults.py b/sorl/thumbnail/conf/defaults.py
index a039ca9bf..f5a7c494b 100644
--- a/sorl/thumbnail/conf/defaults.py
+++ b/sorl/thumbnail/conf/defaults.py
@@ -81,3 +81,6 @@
 # or height given
 THUMBNAIL_DUMMY_RATIO = 1.5
 
+# Timeout, in seconds, to use when retrieving images with urllib2
+THUMBNAIL_URL_TIMEOUT = None
+
diff --git a/sorl/thumbnail/images.py b/sorl/thumbnail/images.py
index 515024e62..f9bc2c7c7 100644
--- a/sorl/thumbnail/images.py
+++ b/sorl/thumbnail/images.py
@@ -166,7 +166,7 @@ def url(self):
 
 class UrlStorage(Storage):
     def open(self, name):
-        return urllib2.urlopen(name)
+        return urllib2.urlopen(name, None, settings.THUMBNAIL_URL_TIMEOUT)
 
     def exists(self, name):
         try: