Question about Images on FTP

[goldnuggetsales.com]

On the "Remote Site" side of my FTP the images folder will only allow me to see 2000 images. I can have more than 2000 photos in the images folder but I can only see 2000 of them, which means I can't delete images individually if they are not in the first 2000 images showing. I contacted my website host and an IT guy and both said that is a universal limitation to FTP. How do other who need to manage more than 2000 images handle this? Thanks in advance for any input you can give me.

Regards,

goldnuggetsales.com

[schoolboy]

Sites with a very large number or products/images should categorise the images...

public_html/images/category_one/

public_html/images/category_two/

public_html/images/category_three/

Apart from being able to see all of them in your FTP remote pane, it makes for faster loading times on your web pages.

[torvista]

Don't put all images in the one folder: use subfolders as much as possible.
Note you can only go one subfolder deep:
/images/whatever/image.jpg

[goldnuggetsales.com]

Looks like both replies are directing me to create subfolders to the images folder. Can someone please tell me how to create subfolders in my images folder? Thanks.

[schoolboy]

Creating the sub-folders is the easy bit... You can even do this in your FTP program - simply create the folders as yiou would create any folder.

The next steps are a bit more cumbersome...

1. You will have to MOVE images from the main images folder, into their respective sub-folders.

2. You will have to ALTER the path statements in the database (ie: the records in the database that define where a product's image(s) is/are located.

We have tackled this several times and go about it this way.

STEP ONE
Use FTP to send the ENTIRE images folder to a local machine.

STEP TWO
Do a DATA DUMP of the products table (either with EasyPopulate or Apsona). Objective is to get the product data into a spreadsheet.

Then - using various spreadsheet tools, we ADD the additional directories to the image names, so the products_image field looks something like this.

category1/image1.jpg
category1/image2.jpg
category1/image3.jpg
category2/image4.jpg
category2/image5.jpg
category2/image6.jpg
category2/image7.jpg

STEP THREE
Get someone to re-arrange the actual image folder (the one we FTP'd earlier, creating folders and moving the images into appropriate folders IN STRICT ACCORDANCE with the data in the spreadsheet.

When we have a LOCAL images folder, with all the appropriate sub-folders, and all the images in the right folders, we move to...

STEP FOUR
Put the site into maintenance mode.

STEP FIVE
RE-NAME the images folder on the server to IMAGES-OLD

STEP SIX
FTP the NEW images folder from our local machine to the server.

STEP SEVEN
UPDATE the products table with our altered spreadsheet data (either via EasyPopulate, or Apsona shopadmin)

STEP EIGHT
TEST several products to see if the images are showing. If tests are PASSED, go to step 9...

STEP NINE
FTP the IMAGES-OLD folder to a local drive (make an off-site backup), then delete it off the server.

STEP TEN
Switch off maintenance mode...

[goldnuggetsales.com]

Wow. Thanks. That is way more complicated than I expected. There isn't an easier way to just create a new folder or subfolder and just start loading photos into that folder and then using that folder or subfolders address in the product listing? That is what I would like to do. I just need an easy way to do it, as I am technologically handicapped.

[schoolboy]

... and then using that folder or subfolders address in the product listing?

What do you mean by "product listing"?

[gjh42]

For new images added to products, you can do exactly what you suggest. The subfolders will appear in the dropdown at the right of the product image section in admin.

If you want to move existing images associated with products into subfolders, you will need to do as schoolboy describes, or else go into each product and reassign the images using their new locations as if you were adding them for the first time.

[schoolboy]

... or else go into each product and reassign the images using their new locations as if you were adding them for the first time.

I thought about suggesting this... but how many years does the OP have on-hand to do this? With over 2000 images, I assume there are several thousand products... a big job to do manually

[gjh42]

That's why I mentioned the possibility *after* saying to do as you had described:)