Yet another query about bulk image association

[linniedarling]

My web designer just gave me a fresh new Zencart to replace my failing ecommerce store on a different platform.

My present ecommerce store has about 1K products. Each product has three or four images. The images follow my camera's naming, i.e. SDCF200115.jpg, SDCF200116.jpg, SDCF200125.jpg. I also have stock product images that are png or gif format. My task is to get my products from my old store to my new store. My plan is to do this utilizing the CSV importing tool.

I've examined all the postings here and the ZC support pages and am getting a very bad feeling about image names.

It seems I will have to rename all my images to follow the ZC formatting if I'm going to associate them automatically with my products from a CSV import. I've seen many explanations of this and several use the phrasing "Simply rename" which has to be someone's idea of a cruel joke.

I've looked and looked and found sporadic information about an addon: Additional Product Images, http://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=1063
All the forum postings seem to indicate this is broken or working sporadically. There is also no clear explanation of what this does and being a ZC newbie I'm reluctant to start installing things without a better understanding.

My questions are:

Does the above named module work? What does it do?
Have there been any improvements made to the csv importing tool that would handle different image names for second and succeeding images?
Does someone have an automated renaming tool? Perl script? Excel routine?
Or is there some other module or extra that will make this task easier?
Will the numeric postfix work with .gifs or .pngs? i.e. image_1.jpg, image_2.png, image_3.gif
Any other ideas or help available?

[jlizotte]

ok...first...and no offense...if your "bad feeling" equates to work...then you need to choose another way to make a living.

Image names are simple. end in _001, _002. etc, and all is good. Your camera names are fine as long as you know which is which (product I mean).

Old products to new store is easy-cheesey. Keep your database (copy of) (which btw includes the image info), and do an upgrade.

Apsona, easy populate, etc all work with import/ export files.

Instead of being lazy and asking what would make this easier...I'd ask you to rephrase your question to "is this easily possible?". That question is answered in the above few lines. (Yes!)

[linniedarling]

Bad feeling doesn't equate to work -- it equates to messy import procedure fraught with errors.

Work? I work pretty much all my waking hours (minus life maintenance) on my ecommerce business. I'm not sure why rephrasing my question is important or why an automated solution would be lazy.

Yes, the naming convention is simple. Got it.

CSV import, easy. Got it.

First image in CSV, easy. Got it.

Automatic association of images using default naming convention, easy. Got it.

Uploading tons of image files via FTP, easy. Got it.

Second and succeeding images? Renaming 2,000+ image files? Not so easy. To get my present shop into a CSV format that Zencart will like is already a major task. A CSV from one platform does not equate to a Zencart CSV. Errors and problems can be introduced when hand manipulating any large text files.

My question is if there is an app or update to the CSV module that is out there that will handle the second and succeeding image association via an automated way, that does not require the Zencart automatic image naming convention, OR, will rename automatically. If someone already has a Perl or excel script that will do this that they would like to pass along I would appreciate it although I'm pretty sure I'll have to write something myself.

The other question is about png or gif formatted images and if they will automatically show up if named similarly to the Zencart jpg naming, i.e. image_1.jpg, image_2.gif, image_3.png

[gjh42]

Rewriting Zen Cart's image handling system to accommodate your current random filenames would be a major job for an expert PHP developer.
Your best bet is to develop a script for converting all additional images associated with a product to successive versions of the original product image name. There must be some rational association in your database or a CSV taken from it to connect these images, right?
Even better would be a script that changes the initial random camera names to reflect the product name, model or something unique, so you can look at an image file and tell what it belongs to.

Different file types are another issue. Zen Cart's image system works on only one file type per product.

Have you investigated Image Handler 4? It may be able to work with random original filenames (I haven't used it).

[linniedarling]

Rewriting Zen Cart's image handling system to accommodate your current random filenames would be a major job for an expert PHP developer.
Your best bet is to develop a script for converting all additional images associated with a product to successive versions of the original product image name. There must be some rational association in your database or a CSV taken from it to connect these images, right?
Even better would be a script that changes the initial random camera names to reflect the product name, model or something unique, so you can look at an image file and tell what it belongs to.

Different file types are another issue. Zen Cart's image system works on only one file type per product.

Have you investigated Image Handler 4? It may be able to work with random original filenames (I haven't used it).

If there is nothing out of the box then yes, I'll have to write something. I wanted to check before I launched into a major to-do.

I hate re-inventing something and was hoping since this is an issue that seems to occur with some frequency that someone had already created a straightforward solution.

Indeed, you're correct in that there is already an association. My present platform has it's CSV images with columns that read "Main Image", "Image 2", "Image 3", "Image 4". Seems so simple that it did not occur to me to ask my web designer if this was not present.

The idea to have the script rename the images to correlate with the product name is a good idea.

I have Image Handler 4 but have not looked at whether it handles non jpeg format images; will do so when I encounter those few non jpegs that I've used.

thanks for your reply

[gjh42]

Zen Cart (and presumably IH4) can handle any standard image format; it just has to be the same format for all images of any one product. It would be possible to alter the image code to handle any desired combination of image types, but that would increase processing time for all images as multiple searches would have to be run every time. Zen Cart allows unlimited additional images. The price of that is not having the image names stored in a finite db table.