My big question is this: how can you get the system to understand you want your small & medium images to be "gif," and a jpg for the large image? It seems to me a lot of stores wouldn't want 8k or 10k jpgs displayed on their category overview pages, but .gifs that represent the product (e.g. a bumpersticker design for the small image, and the bumpersticker as it actually looks on a car).
I have to say... I think this is a pretty silly way to have to do things, and unnecessarily confuses new people. I spent 2 hours futzing with this just to get it going, when it should be handled by having extra fields on the product management form.
If this was set up sensibly,
- There would simply be three fields, one for the small, medium, and large images.
- There would be additional image fields if you need to display more than one image for a product per page.
- The user could then set up their image directories however they wanted.
- Image management would be immediately apparent.
Nevertheless, I'm focussed on the "how to do a small/med gif and large jpeg" question, rather than this mini-rant. Has anyone had this dilemma?
After having read through the posts in this thread, here's the process I now use to work the images on the site:
If you already have the product category folders set up, skip to step 7.
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create a subfolder (named after the category of product is useful, but not necessary) in the main 'images' directory, if it doesn't exist.
2a. create the directory 'large' in the main 'images' directory, if it doesn't exist.
2b. in this 'large' directory, create a subfolder with the same name as the one in step 1.
3a. create the directory 'medium' in the main 'images' directory, if it doesn't exist.
3b. in this 'medium' directory, create a subfolder with the same name as the one in step 1
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make sure the permissions for all these directories you've created are set to 777.
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in image > configuration, make sure the option "calculate image size is turned on."
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in your image editing program of choice, create the images necessary for your projects, at the large size. shrink them down to make the medium and small images, adding light "sharpening" if necessary before saving them. Make sure your large size images are all the same size, and there should be uniformity among the medium and small size images as well.
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the filenames of the medium and large images must be identical to the small image, except:
- the medium version of the image must be named:
filename_MED.jpg
- the large version of the image must be named:
filename_LRG.jpg
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with FTP/Dreamweaver, upload the large images to the folder:
images/large/subdirectory
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with FTP/Dreamweaver, upload the medium images to the folder:
images/medium/subdirectory
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Go to the Zen Cart product manager. In the product info page for each product, aim the field with the "browse" button to the correct file (for that product) in images/subdirectory — the "small" image. Upload it with "preview", and it will become the product image, and then "update."
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the system will correctly point to the medium and large images as necessary.
For workflow purposes, upload everything first with FTP, and then go back through existing products to guide them to the small image.
