Ramblings from “The Mad Wizard” about eCommerce, Yahoo! Stores and other random thoughts

Well today’s post is all about images.  We all know that in your Yahoo! Store you can edit any item and manually upload images.  We’ve all done it, and we all don’t care for doing it over, and over, and over, and over again.  It’s a very simple system to use, but what do you do if you have hundreds or thousands of images to load?

The first choice everyone turns to is using the bulk image upload tool in your store.  Simply go to your Store Editor and go to the Controls page (if you don’t see Controls try clicking the small red right arrow to get to the advanced editor).  Then in there you’ll see a link for Multiple Image Upload.  Click on it and you can upload a zip file (compressed folder if you’re using windows built in compression) with your images.

There are some requirements you can see at Yahoo’s Help page at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/store/context/context-24.html

Basically it boils down to the images must be jpg, gif, png or tiff and the filename portion of the file must match each item’s ID.  So if the image in the file is abc.jpg then the image will get loaded on the item with an ID of abc (basically drop the extension off the file and the id must match that).

This will load the images on to the main IMAGE property of each item in the store.

Okay, so many of you even know this already but I wanted to make sure to explain it all for those that are having issues with this.

But what if you want to load images on to the insets? Or icons? Or even a custom image property, for example inset1 or some other custom property you’ve created?  Can it be done?  The answer is YES.

It used to be that there wasn’t a way to do it and so I actually created a program to do it.  It was our Graphic Uploader but luckily that’s not even needed if you aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty with a database upload (Help in Yahoo is at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/store/edit/advanced/advanced-18.html).

So here’s the down and dirty on the workaround, trick, cheat, or whatever you want to call it.

Basically by default the bulk image upload facility attaches images to items based on the ID of the item matching the base filename of the image.  Well the bulk image upload facility also can compare the base filename of the image against data you upload in the database upload file.  So what you need to do is create a database upload file that lists the filename of the image you want connected (without the extension) and load that data in a column/field that is titled the image property you want it to load in.  This sounds more complex than it actually is, so let’s look at an example.

Let’s say I’ve got 3 items I want to load images for but I want to load them on the INSET property, not the main IMAGE property.   And for our examples sake we’ll say that the ids are ABC1, ABC2 and ABC3 and we’ve named our images abc1-inset.jpg, abc2-inset.gif and notherinset.png (just to mix it up).

So our database upload file would look like:

id,inset
abc1,abc1-inset
abc2,abc2-inset
abc3,anotherinset

Once we have that file then all we need to do is use the database upload feature built into the store editor by going to Database Upload and uploading the file (make sure to use ADD not rebuild) and then zipping the images and using the built in bulk image upload feature.  It’s actually worked to also load in the reverse order by using the bulk image upload then the database upload, but in my mind the database upload then image upload makes more sense.

When Yahoo processes the bulk image upload file it will look and tie the filenames to the filenames used in the database upload file and attach them to the correct locations.

There are a few caveats that you’ll want to watch out for just to be safe and to be sure all goes well.

1. Make sure your image filenames don’t match any existing item ids.  This way Yahoo won’t accidentally attach the image to another product you weren’t expecting.  I always end my images with -inset or -icon or -whatever so that I’m sure they’re different.
2. Make sure after your database upload to check the CONTENTS field on your home page if you aren’t loading a path property.  Yahoo will frequently add the items to the contents of the home page when you don’t give a path in the upload. So just edit the home page, look at the CONTENTS box, and then look towards the end of what’s in the box and you can remove them and save.
3. Some users have seen where if they load the same image on multiple items (through the same filename) and then they delete one of the items it causes the images on all the items to get removed.  I haven’t actually tested and confirmed this so don’t know if it always happens or if there is any timeframe on it happening, but just FYI.   If you want to avoid this risk just make sure every image you upload gets it’s own filename and you should be good.

Hopefully this helps someone out there figure out the best way to handle their images.  With being able to bulk upload, yahoo’s new image handling options, and some creative RTML, you can pretty much do whatever you want with images in the store now…and not have to spend hours clicking on the IMAGE button to do it