Copy multiple products from one category to another

Hello is there a way to copy multiple products of one category to another category. I do not want them linked as I will be changing the picture once they are copied to another category. Is this possible?
I am currently copying a product over one by one and it is taking me forever as I have over 25 products in one category and I need to copy them to 30 other categories.

I need help with this question as well. I am just starting out and am using a drop shipper supplier. I paid a "service" to upload the inventory for this supplier. They have uploaded over 2,000 products to my site. This was a custom install. They provide this service for Zen Cart users as well as others so they have the correct format to import.

Now I have all these products but they are not in the categories I would choose. I certainly know how to move products around but doing it one at a time will take days if not weeks.

The "service" has suggested that I make an export of my store into a database and re-categorize the products (i.e. Excel ) then import the store to make the changes.

Please can anyone explain how I would do that?

@peppyone

You would use the Easy Populate add-on module

I have been looking at Easy Populate as suggested. It looks pretty darn confusing to me. Some people are having problems. Perhaps they are trying to do some fancy stuff.

What happened to me is that I had an inventory management company upload and entire inventory of products to my web site.

One category called Miscellaneous has over 1,000 products. They need to be moved into a category where someone might actually discover them and buy them.

Many products do not have a picture. These I want to inactivate these until I can upload the photos. So for now, I want to move them into a category that will be disabled until I can get to it.

Will Easy Populate help me to see what the photo is, if there is one? I cannot always tell by model number or name what category it would best be in. Also it might be best to be in more than one category. Will it let me link it to other categories?

Will Easy populate help me with those chores? And is it really “Easy”?

peppyone:

I have been looking at Easy Populate as suggested. It looks pretty darn confusing to me. Some people are having problems. Perhaps they are trying to do some fancy stuff.

What happened to me is that I had an inventory management company upload and entire inventory of products to my web site.

One category called Miscellaneous has over 1,000 products. They need to be moved into a category where someone might actually discover them and buy them.

Many products do not have a picture. These I want to inactivate these until I can upload the photos. So for now, I want to move them into a category that will be disabled until I can get to it.

Will Easy Populate help me to see what the photo is, if there is one? I cannot always tell by model number or name what category it would best be in. Also it might be best to be in more than one category. Will it let me link it to other categories?

Will Easy populate help me with those chores? And is it really “Easy”?

Easy Populate will help with a lot of what you need. However, with that many products it would be best to spend some time planning/organizing first and then tackle it. Once you understand how easy populate works it's easy.
As for photos, it would be best to come up with some sort of naming convention before uploading them to your new store.

This will take a little bit more time, but it will save a lot of time and headache later on.

Or you can do it directly on your database with phpmyadmin, very easy task.

CAUTION: do not attempt to use any database manipulation tools or work directly in your database without making usable backups first.

peppyone:

I have been looking at Easy Populate as suggested. It looks pretty darn confusing to me.Easy Populate has a number of functions that can obscure the fundamental simplicity of using it to export a tab delimited file of your products, manipulating them in a spreadsheet, exporting them back to a tab delimited file and using Easy Populate to re-import them to your Zen Cart.
peppyone:

One category called Miscellaneous has over 1,000 products. They need to be moved into a category where someone might actually discover them and buy them.With your data in a spreadsheet, you simply type the category you want each product moved to.
peppyone:

Many products do not have a picture. These I want to inactivate these until I can upload the photos. So for now, I want to move them into a category that will be disabled until I can get to it.You could do this, but easier would be to simply set the their product status to 0. You could do this extremely quickly using a formula in a spreadsheet.{/QUOTE]
peppyone:

Will Easy Populate help me to see what the photo is, if there is one? I cannot always tell by model number or name what category it would best be in. Also it might be best to be in more than one category. Will it let me link it to other categories?Easy Populate is a tool for importing and exporting data. The data manipulation is done in a spreadsheet, so you won't be able to "see" the photos, only their filenames. But you could easily have a Zen Cart window open at the relevant listings page alongside your spreadsheet to achieve this. You can copy a product to a new category by just copying the product details to an additional line and changing the category name.
peppyone:

Will Easy populate help me with those chores? And is it really “Easy”?Yes (see above) and Yes-ish (managing a large database of products isn't easy; but Easy Populate is the easiest way that I know of to do so).

I need some serious help. I purchased EP and it is installed BUT and it is a very big BUT. I did not install Zen Cart in a directory as suggested. Now in order for EP to work, the upload directory has to be the root directory out of the public area. I cannot install the uploads directory any higher than it is.

My thought now is what to do? I really feel I have gone too far with my setup to start over. I have considered trying to move everything over to another webserver but this time under a directory name and editing all the pointers (not sure what they all would be). I did some some info about moving Zen Cart to another server.

I figured out how to back up my database and can copy over Zen Cart files. Do I really need to do it this way.

What do the gurus say? I really would like this all to work.

Since you PURCHASED it, wouldn't it be faster if you contact the Author of that mod DIRECTLY since he is the one who knows it best?

Yes and I have as of last Saturday with no reply yet. Maybe he is on vacation. I am getting anxious.

I don't know how this mod works, but my guess (and should be 99% true) that it should not be too hard to edit the config file of the mod somewhere and fix this problem. It's just a matter of setting the right path to the files.

Some one who is familiar with this mod should be able to help you with this.

Something similar is possible through the multiple categories link manager. You can batch copy products to another category as 'linked products', or you can remove a linked category from a category of products. You can also reset the master category for a range of products.

Not exactly the same - but with some management, it could be very useful.