[Resolved] All images from the shop shown with every product?

[Zillianne]

Hi in the admin panel, when creating (or editing) a (new) product, on the 'images' tag, all the shop's images are shown.  Just starting with 3 products now and can make sense of it, but what if 500 products are added, unless you name all images exactly with product title and date (to be able to recognize them), how can you ever find the right images that were inserted with a specific product? I would expect that, when editing a product, only those images who are assigned to that product are shown?

 

[keat]

I have over 4500 images, I've never counted.

I find that if I scroll through, provided that I don't blink, I can just about spot the yellow star or tick box.

[Zillianne]

OK, still kind of weird..  Should be more interesting if only images are shown belonging to the product itself (as I saw in other shop software).  But ok, guess we can live with it because otherwise CC is quite awesome.

[keat]

95% of my images have files names that represent the part number or description of the item, so if i can't find it by part number, I'll check by description.

 

[Zillianne]

OK, I understand, it just a matter of organizing then, no prob.

thanks for reaction!

[Dirty Butter]

When I first started using CC I was moving from my own coded pages and the images were numerically named. Finding the image to match to a product was a nightmare.

After quickly realizing that was not wise, I now fill out the product listing info and THEN name the image in my photo software. Then I import it from the product image tab. That way the image is named in a meaningful way. If I want to change the current image(s), I use the browser search on the image tab page to find the current image, un-click the star, and replace the image.

Start with a good naming system, and it won't be an issue.

[Zillianne]

Indeed, clean organizing the photos is essential.  No problem we'll do that, furthermore this system is really good (or better, whatever).  Problem is that some customers want to do their own 'content management', and then some real issues occur... huge and wrong font faces and sizes, etc... Very well done from CC developers to notice that images of 3000x4500px are not allowed (some people think, they need this size for quality..)!!! Our poor server limits ahhh....

 

[bsmither]

"Should be more interesting if only images are shown belonging to the product itself."

I can see a use where the General tab has a non-editable thumbnail of all associated images -- the main Product Inventory list has the main image thumbnail.

Then treat the Images tab as a separately loaded settings page that deals only with the product's image(s) where one can assign from the list of all available images or unassign existing assigned images.

(If adding/editing a product shows only already assigned images, how would one assign any other new image?)

[BooJewels]

I have over 5000 images with my site and as Dirty Butter said, organisation - or a system - that works is essential.  My own system is suitable for me and the way I work, so you'll need to find what works for you, but I'll outline what I do below as it might give you some ideas.

I realised a few years ago (had a CC store for at least 8 years now) that having all of my images in one big directory would be tiresome to scroll through to find images, so since then I started creating separate directories.  I only use photos that I take myself and for the site, very predominantly, from one camera which I keep on sequential numbering, so I've never had duplicates and for each of my cameras I add a suffix to identify it anyway.  Because I make jewellery, I name any finished photo with the name of the type of jewellery and the image frame number, so something like earrings30852f.jpg - that identifies what it is, the frame number and which camera I used.

I also always use the main first photo number as the product code (so that pair of earrings will be 30852f), so I can easily identify a product from the photos if a client refers to it some years later, I just look through my index of photos.  It also helps me hone down where the images are in the directory list as all the images used for a product will likely be close together numerically, so tend to appear in a cluster.  And earrings all appear together, as do bracelets etc.

I start a new directory when I pass each 1000 frames on my camera, which represents 200-300 finished images on the server. The big mistake I made when I started this system was not naming the directories directly after the image frame range, which would have been easier still.  I also keep a notebook with a list of all the photos I use for each product, along with its sizes and materials, just to make the listing process itself easier.

As bsmither has just posted, one tab with the images actually used separate from a general list for adding images would be very useful.  Since I updated to CC6 and a new skin, some of my images are a less than ideal shape on the page, so I'm swapping some main images over to a better shaped one, so being able to get at just the ones used to toggle through them changing their status would be a nice feature.

[Dirty Butter]

I put in a request a long time ago on GitHub for the ability to save an image to a folder from the Product Image tab, but nothing ever came of it. Without that, the folders I had already tediously moved images into are not much help, using my method of saving images.

[bsandall]

As others have stated, directories are great for organizing photos. Since our company is a distributor for a variety of manufacturers, I have an image directory for each manufacturer and sometimes subdirectories within those. Similarly to Keat, I name all of my image files after product codes for easier identification when assigning them, but even more than that, it's so I don't ever have to manually upload or assign images - I wrote a quick script to do that for me which I use in my offline staging site, then upload my database and new files at various intervals.