Using external images

[IAINMCG]

Hi guys,

hope you can assist me as this hs been a nightmare. My supplier wants me to use live images from their site for my products. I've installed the external image mod but the zen cart is looking for my images in the location:

http://thepetpad.co.uk/images/thepet...pink%20paw.JPG

instead of
http://thepetpad.co.uk/images/round%20pink%20paw.JPG

Can anyone tell me what's wrong. The site is www.thepetpad.co.uk.

Thanks guys

Iain

[schoolboy]

I've installed the external image mod ...

Well... it is not so much an "installation" as a series of core edits. And the "module" was last tested on ZC 1.3.8 - so whether it is compatible with 1.5 is questionable.

HOW did you do these edits? Did you backup the original core files mentioned in the instructions?

Are you putting the full URL path into the image field?

This is not a recommended way of handling images in your website. Ask your "supplier" to either make available their image repository (where you can download the images to your server), or put them onto a CD for you.

Your supplier needs to be told that modern CMS platforms don't handle things this way anymore.

[IAINMCG]

Hi,

I did backup all my files before doing the core edits, I used the plugin external image tool for zen cart and followed instructions.

I could probably download all the images but won't this slow my sight down and take longer to load?

Thanks

[Limitless]

Hi,

I did backup all my files before doing the core edits, I used the plugin external image tool for zen cart and followed instructions.

I could probably download all the images but won't this slow my sight down and take longer to load?

Thanks

It will actually be faster, as you won't be dependent on yet another web server serving up the images.

The only time it ~may~ help would be if you use a CDN type network, cloudfront, cloudflare, akamai, etc but you would still want to host the images.

[schoolboy]

It will actually be faster, as you won't be dependent on yet another web server serving up the images.

The only time it ~may~ help would be if you use a CDN type network, cloudfront, cloudflare, akamai, etc but you would still want to host the images.

The "path-to-image" is nothing more than a REFERENCE in the database, RELATIVE to the CORE PATH defined for a resource's LOCATION.

For "external" images, what you are having to do is OVER-RIDE core behaviour, with CUSTOM behaviour.

CORE behaviour assumes that product images are going to reside in the images folder (or possibly a SUB-folder in the images folder).

The PATH to this folder is established in the configure.php file, and CORE behaviour states that it is whatever-folder-name in the DIR_WS_IMAGES define statement.

Now... once you have made all the edits to the CORE FILES that use "DIR_WS_IMAGES" as the key referencing point for INTERNAL images, you are going to have to MANUALLY ADD the URL to the path for every product image you add.

So... what you need to do is this.

When you ADD a product in your admin console (admin>>>catalog>categories/products>>> add a product), when you get to the part which asks you to add an image, you need to TYPE INTO the field that says:-
Or, select an existing image file from server, filename:
domain.com/images/image1.jpg

WHERE:
domain.com (is the domain of your supplier... do not enter "http://")
/images (is the DIRECTORY on their server where the images live)
/image1.jpg (is the name of the image for the product in question)

[IAINMCG]

Hi schoolboy, tried that but image still tries to et image from location mydomain.com/images/domains want.com/images/image1.jpg

Can u help, I'm so frustrated lol