HOW-TO: Image Preparation

[kbmets7]

Excuse the complete Newbie question. I have to upload thouands of product images, since I switched from Volusion to Zencart. In Volusion i would FTP the images to my "images" folder. I just went to my Zencart FTp site and cannot find a folder for: images, images/medium and images/large directories.

Where are they? Do I have to create them? Please provide an explicit repsonse for the Zen challenged.

Does Image Handler help with this?

Thank you

[ted]

Your images folder is in the same directory as your includes and admin folders, the medium and large folders are contained within the images folder. If you don't see an images folder maybe when you uploaded the cart it did not upload completely?

[kbmets7]

I found them. Thanks, don't know how i did not see them.

Can i create sub directories for my images under "images", by product type:

/public_html/images/baseball/product1.jpg

/public_html/images/basketball/product2.jpg

Then can I upload a csv file for my products with Easy Populate and specify in the product url field:

mystore.com/public_html/images/baseball/product1.jpg and

mystore.com/public_html/images/basketball/product2.jpg

Will my images then show up for those products?

Thanks SOOOO much!

[dalabera]

Newbie here, hope some would answer my worry:

How Zen Cart read the images while viewing a product?

What I'm afraid is that I could have 50K products along with their small,medium,large images and it could be reading the folder full of images everytime.

My guest is that is reading the primary file from the database and from here it assume the rest, however would need to confirm this.

Please help.

[SoftDux]

Hi

I hope someone can help me. I have setup a shop for a client (http://www.actionlens.net/shop) who sells photos, so all his products are images. The problem is, all the images have a set height & width of 100 pixels, regardless of what the actual image sizes are.

I have followed the instructions on this HOWTO, and have the following opsions set:

Calculate Image Size - true
Image - Use Proportional Images on Products and Categories - 1

The moment I disable the width of any image, it gives me images which looks like they could be 1pixels wide. What am I missing?

[SoftDux]

Doesn't anyone know?

[ted]

Have you uploaded the images in 3 different sizes to the correct folders or just the 100x100 images to the /images directory? Zen will take a large image and scale it down using the proportions but it will not enlarge a small image unless the larger image is there with the same name and uploaded correctly.

It's all in the placement in directories by sizing the images and then you won't need the proportional images setting at all. Search the forum for calico_cat and you'll find a great tutorial there.

[ted]

Dalabera I would suggest with that many products and images that you use some subdirectories for your images to keep the folder sizes down to a manageable level and speed up the loading.

I first ran into this problem when managing my images due to FTP limitations where I could only view or work with approx 2000 images. The folder had 10000 images so there were some that could never be seen or worked with.

I'd also suggest the calico cat search and get your 3 different sized images to ease page loading times.

[SoftDux]

Have you uploaded the images in 3 different sizes to the correct folders or just the 100x100 images to the /images directory? Zen will take a large image and scale it down using the proportions but it will not enlarge a small image unless the larger image is there with the same name and uploaded correctly.

It's all in the placement in directories by sizing the images and then you won't need the proportional images setting at all. Search the forum for calico_cat and you'll find a great tutorial there.

I'm actually using the ZenCart addon for Gallery2 . So, the images are loaded into Gallery2 (http://www.actionlens.net), and then automatically updloaded to the ZenCart (http://www.actionlens.net/shop). Since this is a photography website, the image sizes differ

[ted]

With the proportioning you're not going to be able to resize images that are not square to 100x100 without distortion.

One suggestion I saw was to start with a square image size ie: take your 426x640 image and put it on a transparent canvas of 650x650. Then the image size would be square and would resize properly and in proportion.

I'd check for a forum on the mod you're using and ask others that are using it how they handle the settings, I'm not familiar with that mod.