Back to the subject of the products management in magento stores – we can say that one of the subcategories of products data in the online store is – management of images / photographs of the goods. If you have been facing these tasks in magento, then you might probably know that this can present large separate subtasks of product management for magento stores with a catalog of 50 and more product items.
As a standard way you will have to open each product item individually for editing via the magento product grid. Then, open the ‘Images’ tab and look if it has any product images. If it is necessary you will individually select and upload images for products. Also you will need to set the default images separately for the ‘Base’ / ‘Thumbnail’ / ‘Small’ images. As you may have already guessed – when it comes to dozens, hundreds and thousands of products, then this routine process takes days or weeks to check and upload required product images.
So what we can do in this situation? The first obvious problem – certainly, it is an opportunity to see product images on product grid manager page. This allows you visually identify products quickly to determine how the goods look, whether the product images exist and whether it is necessary to change them. To solve this problem you can refer to:
- Admin Product Grid Images extension that allows you to add three columns of images to the product grid. It allows you to see Thumbnail, Small, Base images of the goods.
- Advanced Admin Products Manager extension that allows you to add product data attributes right into the product grid, as well as you can select option to display the image of the products – Small, Base, Thumbnail images. If necessary you can also select the size of the images in these columns of the product grid or add a server path to the images.
- Ajax Mass Images Upload extension allows you to see ALL product images, including Small, Base, Thumbnail images which are highlighted with markers.
But of course, the most interesting thing is how we can quickly and effectively manage a large number of product images. There are two approaches:
Through magento extensions which improve magento user interface, that allow you to optimize the way you manage product images right in the magento administrative user interface.
An example of such magento extension is Ajax Mass Images Uploader. This extension enhances the magento product grid. Extension adds additional columns of products data such as Small, Base, Thumbnail images to magento product grid. Also, for each product extension adds a section that displays the entire list of images that are linked to this product.
This section allows you to upload images by clicking ‘+’ button or via drag & drop interface – you can just drag the list of images and drop right under this section, and the images will automatically start uploading to the corresponding product through ajax. This feature allows you to work with a large number of products at the same time without waiting for the completion of the images uploading process. This process happens automatically without your participation after having dropped necessary images into the required section.
Scripts or magento extensions that allow you to sort a prepared array of images.
This approach allows you to upload prepared array of product images files to the server. Such an extension will extract indificators of products in file names by getting a full list of files. These identifiers enable extension to find products in the magento product catalog as well as to get relevant data about each product. By acquiring such data about product extension it will add links between these products and upload product images.
Conclusion
As we can see there are different approaches to solve the problem of product images update and adding product images in magento stores. These methods differ in terms of cost and time. You can make use of already developed solutions which enhance magento store administrator via User Interface improvement such as Advanced Admin Products Manager, Ajax Mass Images Uploader. Or you can use custom development scripts or extension which parse already uploaded products images package.