Understanding Product Images

[Guest lordbarron]

Hi Folks,

I posted a bulletin regarding my whacky images earlier on, and I have since resolved this instance of my images messing up (my thumbs had a small typo stoping them from being found). However now I am still quite confused as to how cubecart and my server deals with images.

Could someone explain the GD setting, and why I need it, or not?

My thumbnails are different images to my main pictures, why does this complicate things so much!

For instance right this minute I can replace and upload my thumbs A'OK but whenever I try to upload my main images via my FTP I get a 'access denied' error,, I've check my file permissions and they are fine, so why won't it let me replace exsisting images?

and just a general explination of how the whole thing words would be great.

thanks Ty

[vokf]

Hi!

GD is a library - so basically a program that CubeCart (and other scripts) uses to manipulate images.

When you upload an image via the Admin Panel (as opposed to using FTP), CubeCart will resize the image twice. The first is placed into /images/uploads, and is the main product image. The 2nd image is the thumbnail, and is placed into /images/uploads/thumbs

You should try setting GD version to 2, and then uploading an image - if you get no error messages, all is ok.

Otherwise, try GD try version 1.

The other GD settings concern allowing GIF support. Without going into too much detail, the main compression system used by GIF was patented, and up until a few years ago, legally creating GIF files was expensive. I think the Patent is not enforced or has lapsed now.

Basically, set GIF support to YES.

The other settings should be fairly simple - thumbnail size, and max image size (if you upload a 2048x1024 image - what should it resize it to)

The quality setting can be left at 80, a lower setting will lower graphic quality for JPG images, with the advantage of a smaller filesize.

Ok. for your scenario.. You can either tweak the store, so it does not generate thumbnails, or manually FTP the images up.

The thumbnail image should have the same filename as the main image, but pre-fixed with thumb_

ie: thumb_Car1.jpg

I can't think why you can't upload images via FTP. What client are you using? Can you upload files to other areas of the site?

Hopefully this info will help you out.

Jason

[Guest lordbarron]

well im having no problems uploading files most of the time. in the past I have had no problems.

This time around another user uploaded items onto the store, i went to attach the images and it started throwing a mental at me.

It was quite eratic , sometimes It would downsize the normal image to a thumb and magically replace the thumb I uploaded, other times it would just not have a thumbnail at all.

It seems to have settled down now, sometimes I find to upload the thumb or image again I need to delete it from the server first, otherwise I recieve a permission error. That seems to calm it, all my settings match my needs and I have turned GD off so that it doesn't resize images anymore. All my images are the right size from the start.

Thanks for explaining it to me, I got confused in the past, all there in one simple note was useful. Maybe not conclusive to my problem, but it seems im struggling more than with just the images, maybe my host , streamline, has something to do with it. Although they have always been excellent.

thanks again,

Ty