I need to add nearly ten thousand products to my site. I find it easy to import product names and related info from excel but am wondering how I could do the same for the product images. Is there any way that I would not have to assign each image to an individual product but have it done on a mass-scale?
Thanks.
This really depends on how standardized your image and sku names are, ie does your sku match your image filename. For instance our sku’s are an alpha-numeric combination that matches the image filename. If this is the case then its just a matter of uploading your images to a media directory for prooducts then defining that in the three columns on your excel sheet. For instance lets say that you do have three sets of images: thumbnail, small_image, image. You could create three folders in media/catalog/product/ that correspond to your three types of images and ftp the images in each directory. Then you could update your excel sheet columns for the three types of images to “thumbnails/[sku].jpg”, “images/[sku].jpg” and “small_images/[sku].jpg”. Re-upload your product feed and you should be good.
You can also check out this thread as well:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/3393/
Hi F.P ,,...would help if you can exactly point out where the module needs to be improved. For me personally, I felt the system should allow import of categories and if it can run from a Cron it would be much better than running it from a UI. Eager to hear your views!
actually I use an oscommerce shop. The dataflow is done by a cron script. I have created special tables and fields in the database to do the import job. The script does it the following way, First it imports all necessary files my distribution channels deliver by FTP. And because of the fact, that there are about 10 files, which all have one key field, which helps to put everything together, I do not think that the import could be done by the dataflow of Magento. All those things must be prepared in a few steps before the real import into magentos own database structure. The second step is to distribute all the content in the special table and fields of the database. Product images go to the media folder. If there are two or more distributors it is necessary to create a table for every distributor and in a further step to compare the products, so no doublets come into the catalogs database. By doing it that way there is now a structure which oscommerce can import into the oscommerce database fields. New products are inserted, already existing products are updated (stock level, description changes if necessary a.s.o.).
Think it is the best way for mass update because it does not slow down the shop and it does not delete any products. It simply actualizes stock or description or image or prize a.s.o.. And if there are two or more distributors the script is able
That should work with magento too, But to do that job the magento database needs to be explained. What database field is the lets call it super-field or key field to identify a product with a unique number? There are a lot of fields in the Dataflow tool and nobody knows what they exactly mean. There is something like old ID, entity ID, categories ID, default category ID. What does that actually mean.? Without an explanation of the database structure, there is no chance to write such a script. It is even not clear whether magento uses IMMO tables or ISAM.
I’m currently downloading the production version and haven’t had the chance to upload the products yet. Are you uploading pictures with the products as well?
we have all our pictures in a database, sorted by sku with mutilple pictures per product.
i load the picture by sku, check the size, resize it if needed and if its big enough, use it as pic picture, if not big enough, i am using it as small picture or thumbnail - if all the pics are saved on local filesystem (per sku) i am checking if the product got a big size image, a small one and a thumbnail, if not - i am sizing down the smallest image to the sizes i need and add the pics to the filesystem by sku_numberofimage.extension
every additional pic goes to the media gallery
its a standalone script and can post it here tomorrow when im back to work…
I tried just adding the name of the file in the various images columns in my import CSV file and then made sure the files existed. Thought this would work but no images show up after theimport.
I’d be very curious to see the script you’ve written, alanin. Please post if you still have available.
my Script is attached - i have all my Images in blobfields in an extra Table (all our Images coming from a Database) - in this Table i have the SKU and refer to my products by the SKU
the first few lines tell the script which size is needed for the shop so it can resize the pics before adding to db
the limit tells the script how many pics to make per run (it will call itself after running, till all images are done)
the entity_ids of the 4 different imagetypes are set below that and finaly the path where to save the images…
the script itself got some comments - but they are in german, so probably wont help you much…
I need to upload my products via my .xml file and would like to know exactly what to put in the images fields. Do I just type in something like /[D2].jpg? Or maybe “/[D2].jpg”? Or something else? (D2 is the cell location in excel...as in column D row 2)
How do they link to my pics if they’re placed in /media/catalog/product/new_folder? Or is the wrong place to put them?
in the database of your magentoshop is a table called catalog_product_entity_varchar in this table are all varchar attributes of a product
attribute_id is the id of the attribute (which is defined in eav_attribute)
entity_id is the id of your product
and value is the value of the product
with this table the path to the images is set - a big image, a small image and a thumbnail image
so my script is uploading the image to a special directory in /media/catalog/product/BC (which is a folder i made) after saving the file there its adding the path BC/name_of_the_image.extension to the catalog_product_entity_varchar database, setting the path, the entity_id and the attribute_id
when this is done the shop knows where to find the small image, big image and thumbnail image
So supposing I have my base and thumbnail images in .gif format and my large images in .jpg format. If I place all those images in /media/catalog/product/miscellaneous (miscellaneous is a folder I would create myself), and each image has the SKU as its name, would it be that all I need to do is to type in the path name for each of the three images for my products in the excel worksheet?
For example, toothbrush has a SKU of 12345. Therefore, I would have 12345.jpg and 12345.gif
What would be the path names then?
Base & Thumbnail images: ?
Large Images: ?
I’m not familiar with scripts or any of the more advanced programming stuff. I’d just appreciate a simple version.
