Easy Populate

[thinkdeal]

Why have a column marked: v_products_url_1 in Easy Populate when it seems to have no function? Products must be uploaded separately from Easy Populate into the root image folder (either by ftp or some other method). Including a product image URL in this column will not make the image appear on your site (whether you include the http:// or not). All you need to include in the Easy Populate .CSV file is the image name (for example: confused.jpg) and that is under the column v_products_image. Am I right about this?

[schoolboy]

Am I right about this?

No...

Open one of your products in the zencart admin product edit screen... scroll down and look at the third field from the bottom...

[thinkdeal]

Without your Easy Populate article I would be lost and that means I have the deepest respect for you! But this time I have no idea what you are talking about. I am in the admin control now and under I cannot see anything under the catalog tab which is the tab that relates to products. What exactly am I looking for? Were my earlier comments about Easy Populate correct? I know you are trying to help me but I'm so new to all this you have to keep everything very simple.

[thinkdeal]

Okay I think I found the box you must be talking about:

Products URL:
(without http://)

But what are you saying? I tried uploading products putting in only the product image URL (without the http://) and I still had no image available. Until I went back and put the imagename.jpg in the other column and then used FTP to upload the image.

[schoolboy]

Let's say you are selling Sony Products.

If you want one of the Sony Camera products to have a link to the sony website page about that product, you put the URL into that field.

EG: The product you are selling is - Sony Camera DSC-WX1

The link you put in the URL field (without http://) is:

www.sony.co.uk/product/dsc-w-series/dsc-wx1

[schoolboy]

This input field is for any url. It can be for an image, but the URL will show ONLY when the visitor click the link in the product info display screen in your zenshop.

The link and associated text will show when there is a URL added. No url added in the field, no link shows.

There is no (easy) way to put a remote url for an image, in order for that image to display in its designated places in zencart.

[thinkdeal]

Thank you, I now fully understand the reason for the URL column in Easy Populate. But its not something I will get much use from!

I do not want customers to have direct links to my suppliers websites.

One of the big problems for me is that my suppliers issue me with a spreadsheet of products and in that file they supply a product image URL. I must now use the URL to download each product individually and then bulk upload them using my friendly FileZilla FTP program. In the past with my old site I could just use he product image URL's.

Anyway, thank you for being one of the most helpful people on this forum.

[schoolboy]

I agree... don't let customers leave your site by providing unnecessary external links.

IMAGE URL's...

Because of the way zencart works with product images in a multitude of contexts, it is not possible to reference images on a remote server without some fairly major modifications to the code. You are also vulnerable to that remote server going down, resulting in no images appearing on your site.

If your supplier gives you URLS to their images, then use a SCRAPER TOOL to get them off their server, so that you can FTP them to your server.

I do this with several drop-shipper sites I manage, and the scraper takes about half an hour to collect about 4000 images.

The process I use is described in POST 9 of this thread:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=118797

[thinkdeal]

I did gice it a try. I managed to download and install the Wget. I created a text file with some sample URL's usining notepad++. I then did the CMD operation but I became stuck at the command prompt when the directory would not change from C:\Documents and Settings\David

I kept typing cd but the directory did not change. I even tried cd C: but that made no difference.

I am still trying ... you must think very trying!

[thinkdeal]

Okay, I'm a dummy! It all works just great! Once again I owe you my thanks!