Duplicating products with different images

[fright-rags]

I posted this inthe Image Handler support thread but unfortunately it got completely buried. Anyway, I need to creat different categories of products using the same designs. I sell shirts and need to make the same designs available in shirts, hoodies, girl's tees, etc. Since colors vary from style to style, I cannot set up one product and have customers pick the different attributes (style, color, size) on one page as the probability of picking a combination that won't work is too high.
So, I want to create all of my products in one category, then duplicate them (not link) to the other categories where I can just change the info (attributes, price, etc). The problem is with the images. The base/main product image is fine....but when I use Image Handler 2 to add model shots (additional images) it adds them to the same product in each category. For example, if I go to one particular design in the hoodie category and upload an additional image of someone wearing a hoodie, it shows up on the same product in the shirt category, and the girl's shirt category. The only way I can get around this is to add the product manually...which will take me forever with all the products I have. I've tried renaming the product and model too, but it doesn't work. Any ideas as to how to get around this?

[DrByte]

Zen Cart uses the image filename assigned to the product as the "base" filename from which to determine which "additional images" also belong to that product.

So, if your product has an image name assigned as "fred.jpg", then all images whose filename match the pattern of "fred*.jpg" will be shown, including "fred123.jpg", "fred_is_a_star.jpg", "fredseesgreen.jpg", etc

In your case I suspect you're going to need to simply alter the product after copying it and edit its filename slightly to make it a tad more unique. Then use your FTP or IH tools to associate images with it. You might even be able to disassociate the existing image first directly from IH and assign new ones with the new more-unique base name.

[fright-rags]

Yeah, I tried copying just the product (no attributes) and then altering the name of it slightly. Then I tried uploading a new image to the new product (alternate image) and named it something completely unrelated (actually, I named it with numbers this time) and still it added the image to the products (of similar design) in al the other categories. The only way around it is to start a product from scratch, but that is going to take me forever...

[gjh42]

What DrByte was saying is that you have to make the base image for each product unique - no product's base image name should begin with any other product's base image name. It's not clear from your description whether you did that.

It may be that IH2 has some persistent name connection?? Your problem might be in there...

[fright-rags]

Hmmm....I never thought of that. Although, the weird thing is that if I set up a new product from scratch with the same base image, the duplicate image thing doesn't occur. But I will try this anyway as that might be the issue.