I’ve read posts regarding earlier and later versions of Zen Cart, but I must not be grasping a concept here. I’ve used Zen Cart for a long time, but this is my first attempt at multiple product images. Ultimately, I’m wondering if Zen Cart literally supports the use of separate thumbnail images.
My point is that for a cleaner presentation on multiple images for products, I want to use square thumbnails that I’ve cropped and reduced in file size for faster page loading. They should link to the larger images which may be portrait or landscape. For the moment, I’ve used CSS to make the thumbnails 50px x 50px. And, currently, using multiple product images works when I have my medium size image and all the thumbnails in the main image directory. Kinda good and I'm half way home.
Maybe I’ve done something wrong, but my problem is that currently, my thumbnails only link to themselves, so I can't use my own custom 50px thumbnail and any portrait or landscape photo used as a thumbnail get squished visually. But, I have no other choice. If I want the thumbnail to load the larger photo, my thumbnail HAS to be the larger photo, just squished and squared by CSS. Not only am I using large photos as thumbnails which are visually messy because they're squished, but I'm reducing page load time because it's loading all the larger images.
This poses some questions about what I’m doing…
• Shouldn’t I be able to literally use a separate image for a thumbnail and have it link to the larger image?
• If I can, how and where should the thumbnails be uploaded? It seems (I could be wrong) that this has changed somewhat through the evolution of Zen Cart.
• Am I not uploading them correctly?
• What directories should I be using for Zen Cart 1.5.1?
My structure in the image directory is:
photo.jpg
photo_01.jpg (thumbnail)
photo_02.jpg (thumbnail)
photo_03.jpg (thumbnail)
I’ve tried all weekend with variations of uploading, using the large directory, etc. and I feel like I’m missing the most basic concepts.
Does anyone have insight to my questions above? As always the community, thanks in advance!
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