[rogue]

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.