Forgive me if this has been amply covered elsewhere, I’ve been reading a lot and turning blue trying to find answers!
I am importing 900 products via CSV – which is mostly going smoothly – except for a persistent issue with the images import.
In short: I’ve put my images on the server, imported the CSV, most of the products find their pictures, and generally all is well. This is what’s driving me nuts though:
- I seem to get multiple instances of somefilename324618237648234652386.jpg, even though I turned off autothumbnails. Is this because CA Cart expects a unique image name for each product? Somebody please confirm if so, so I can stop wondering why this keeps happening.
2) This is the biggie: Why, oh WHY do some of my products attach themselves to the wrong detailed image? I checked carefully, it’s not the CSV. (No, it’s not, I swear!) For some reason, the correct thumbnail image gets selected then when I click for the big detail image, I see another product. Sometimes it’s a completely unrelated one. Anybody know what’s happening here?
- It can’t be helping that I want to use my own thumbnails. I turned off autothumbnail creation. Would it simplify matters dramatically if I just gave in and let the cart make my thumbs? They looked rather ragged, but I could work around that if it’s going to save me hours of messing around with this.
I will admit to being pretty confused as to where images are supposed to go in preparation for import. I tried putting them into images/backup per the suggested default, as well as putting them into images/product and telling the import feature to look there. Last try, I put them into the directories indicated by file export and told the importer to look in the relevant product folder. Nothing really quite works yet.
I saw an old thread about specifying the exact image path, which I’m willing to do, but I’m not sure if a thread from almost three years ago is still relevant to the current version. If it is (or if there’s another thread that covers this) please just boot me in the right direction and I’ll go read 
Thanks in advance,
Dardanus
[quote name=‘adodric’]CS Cart does this so it doesn’t overwrite an existing image of the same name. That same named image could be for a different product that has a completely unrelated picture but the same filename.
[/QUOTE]
Using the same pathname for an image for different products that have different images is an error on the part of the “person”, not the cart.
I don’t like that the cart renames all the images even when given a specific one to use. It make import/export (or any kind of synchronization) a nightmare. Many people like to have their image names reflect the product code (or something about the product) so they know which is which. Having non-human readable image names is just nuts.
I suggest my clients use things like -1.jpg, -2.jpg. While the original image paths and names are left in place, if the product is exported, it doesn’t have the image pathname that was assigned to it.
My guess this is an artifact of 1.35 where images could be stored in the DB and so uniqueness of the “name” versus the “pathname” was critical.
[quote name=‘tbirnseth’]Using the same pathname for an image for different products that have different images is an error on the part of the “person”, not the cart.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I wasn’t saying it is a good or bad thing. I’m just answering his question as to how CS Cart works.
I can see the file re-naming driving me crazy. I’ve always been rather anal about filenaming conventions… my image library has been growing for over 5 years now and the name structure makes it easy to pinpoint a file no matter when it was shot.
I went back to trying to use my thumbnail images, and mostly that’s working. The thing I really hope someone can answer is why the detail images are hooking up wrong. I won’t say it could not possibly be my CSV; it could be that, or it could be something I’m setting wrong in the import options. I’m sure that the product and correct detail image name are connected on the CSV; after that, anything goes!
What I fear is that we’ll have to spend an inordinate amount of time hand-fixing the offending products, which will then have those wacky long filenames once I export the product list for a reference and backup. I thought this was sporadic, but now that I’m looking closer, there seems to be an awful lot of mis-connects. It doesn’t make me want to reject the cart altogether, but… grrrr.
[quote name=‘Dardanus’]The thing I really hope someone can answer is why the detail images are hooking up wrong. I won’t say it could not possibly be my CSV; it could be that, or it could be something I’m setting wrong in the import options. I’m sure that the product and correct detail image name are connected on the CSV; after that, anything goes![/QUOTE]
I haven’t had the issue of the wrong detailed image linking to a product. Make sure that every product you import has a unique “Product Code” in your CSV file even if you don’t use product codes to identify your products. If any item has the same product code it will overwrite the current item with that code and perhaps keep the incorrectly linked detailed images. Just a thought.
I’m not perfectly certain, but it appears that the mis-linked products didn’t have their images on the server. The thumbnails were there, but the detailed images were not, at least in the case of several specific products I checked. I uploaded a bunch of images and re-imported the products. Magically, the number of messed-up products was dramatically reduced.
It appears that when importing, if the cart finds a specified thumbnail, but no detailed image, it just grabs some other image nearby and uses that for the detailed image. This behavior does not make sense, and I can’t guarantee I’m not misinterpreting something, but that is sure what it looks like. Weird.
This leads me to just bite the bullet and load all 4,000 or so images from my old cart’s server. Many of those are no longer needed, but I don’t have time to carefully check every image filename against my current inventory. Trying to eliminate the old ones led me to a couple wasted days troubleshooting the mis-connected products! Now I’m just going to sit back and read some more forum posts while FTP does the dirty work for me 
Thanks, all, for your input. Much appreciated.
[quote name=‘Dardanus’]It appears that when importing, if the cart finds a specified thumbnail, but no detailed image, it just grabs some other image nearby and uses that for the detailed image. This behavior does not make sense, and I can’t guarantee I’m not misinterpreting something, but that is sure what it looks like. Weird.
[/QUOTE]
If this is true, it should be reported as a bug - it makes no sense to grab some arbitrary unrelated image.
Bob