Quote Originally Posted by jmuniz View Post
You do not need to create small, or medium images.. Upload the large image and IH2 takes care of generating the required small and medium images (based on your image size setting in Configuration > Images)

That's great if you only have one image that you'd like to display for the item in all the sizes. In my case I have different images for small vs large. So I'd have to manually work with every item to add the different Large image after creating the item with the "default image" this being the small image.
This is very consuming and very impractical when you have many thousands of items. Just to start, I will be loading over 15K T-shirts, 4K candy items, 2-3K personalized party favors, etc...
The expanded explanation makes things a little clear (thank you) Clearly your store setup is a UNIQUE situation.

The majority of shopowners who use IH2 are using the default Zen Cart image setup/management, and use IH2 to make the work of managing product images easier. This means that they upload the large image as the default image, and let Zen Cart/IH2 take care of creating the product image thumbnails (small image) for them.

The image setup for your store is different than the "average" shopwowner. If you wanted to use IH2 so that the small medium and large images are three distinct image files, in the IH2 interface you would edit the image and upload your small/thumbnail image as your default image then upload your medium image, and then upload your large image. This the only way that IH2 will use different images for each image size.


Quote Originally Posted by jmuniz View Post
IH2 CANNOT work without the "images" directory. It's not as you put it simply a matter of IH2 uploading files in it's own directory.. The purpose of the IH2 cache directory is to help with image performance by caching the images in order to improve page load performance. To create this cache, IH2 must get the image information form the original "source" In this case it's the images directory (and it's sub-directories)

What I have seen is IH2 will use the default image and directory from the Zen item creation (I use EZ Populate for this) to create it's cached version in all the sizes. Then when the "Large" image is edited in IH2, IH2 will upload this new image into the directory images/large/original directory name/

I created an item whose default image is located in images/placecard
When I edited the large image in IH2 it uploaded the new Large image into /images/large/placecard

Is there a way to have the Large images already uploaded in the same fashion and naming convention (_LRG.) and defined to the item without manually editing each item IH2?
Again IH2 follows default Zen Cart behavior for managing large images.. As the help text on the image editing interface indicates:
A default image must be defined. The default image is assumed to be the smallest when medium or large images are entered.
So if you explicitly upload a large image using the IH2 image editing functions it will save the image as you describe. If you do not upload a medium or large image, IH2 assumes that the default image is the large image and creates the small and medium images needed. (which is how Zen Cart's own default image management works)