Image Import/Customization.
 

In reading through COUNTLESS POST I have learned that sooo many people have problems with image importing and such. Wouldn't it be easier if rather than having image links in the DB and all that messing with the imports, if XCART would just look in a specified folder for productSKU.jpg and tn_productSKU.jpg and use those images. Then if you got a new image, you could just upload it and replace the old one. No importing or fussing.

As I am not a programmer I have NO idea how difficult something like this would be, but for those like me with 20,000 items, importing takes HOURS and its a pain when line 18986 has an error in it and you start all over.

Any of the programmers interested in developing this kind of MOD?

Re: Image Import/Customization.
 

Great idea, except for one thing, some (most?) people do not use productSKU.jpg and tn_productSKU.jpg as the image names, and your "solution" doesn't even address product detail photos or variant images.

Re: Image Import/Customization.
 

I agree somewhat, it is a pain to import photos into your site, but I feel as my problem would be somewhat solved if you were just able to replace existing photos via, ftp in the in xcart/images/D,C,T files. I change some photos often and to be able to just replace them using filezilla would save alot of time but i dont know the reason for the write protection on them.

Re: Image Import/Customization.
 

This is exactly the sort of thing my boss has just assigned me to do. Is there no way to get it to work? I've been searching and searching and I have no clue how to add the pictures to x-cart without importing with CSV.

Re: Image Import/Customization.
 

that's what I am planning to do right now by using custom php code that searches in a image dir, finding product/thumbnail images (product_sku.jpg and product_thumb_sku.jpg) as well as variants images. The variants' sku follow a specific sku scheme according to the business logic of my client. My client will rename all images according to this scheme and my script will import images for products, thumbnails and variants.

Re: Image Import/Customization.
 

That is the way the thumbnails and images used to work in earlier versions of X-cart. I have 4.0.x and what we do every day is simply FTP the new images to the proper image directory and that's it. In 4.0 you can specify the name of the image file -on the server- in the product import. This can specify any dir/name for image. No checking (that I can tell) is done on the image name at import time. We frequently import image names for non-existant images. Then later FTP the images to the correct directory.

In current versions there are 3 or 4 directories under the 'images' directory like "t" and when an image is imported it is copied to the appropriate one of these 'letter' directories and renamed by xcart.

You could add a new product extra fields 'image2' and 'thumbnail2' or such in which you specify the full path names of the product images on the server (the images you will FTP to those directories).

Then the current code would have to be changed where thumbnails and images are loaded to a page to try and load the image/thumbnail with the 'image2' or 'thumbnail2' name first then if not there try loading the 'normal' image.

Of course in real life it probably won't be easy to do this. And this doesn't take care of detailed images. Also I think that current x-cart genenerates some sort of image cache with resized images - I don't know the details of that and how this would or would not interact with the changes.

Anyway - food for thought.