pictures not showing after using easypopulate

[Christy]

I am totally stuck! I had been workingn through admin for a year to populate the catalog with products. Yesterday i decided to yse easy populate. SO i downloaded the products through easy populate , then filled the products with model names and uploaded it again through EP.

I saw all products in duplicate ( with and without products models. so I WENT INTO admin and deleted all the products. Uploaded through EP again. Allthe products and categories show nicely but no pictures.

Can someone help?

I am totally stuck.

[red_fraggle]

easypopulate uses "model number" as the point of reference for all products. If you have a product in the store, then change it's "model number" to something else and dont delete the original from the stores Database, you will get 2 copies of that product.

The method i use to handle this is this, download your EP file to edit. open it in excel, copy every column and cell to a location just below the originals. Then add the model numbers to the second set of product in your flat file. Then use the "DELETE" EP function as described in the documentation to remove the products with no model number. Upload the excel file with both sets of products and it will remove the ones missing model numbers since it see's the DELETE tag leaving only those with model numbers in the database. Now re-download your EP file and overwrite the excel file on your PC with it and you should be all set.

Now for images not showing, are you using MO-PICS or something similar?

[Christy]

Thanks very much for quick response! I wish I had posted here before actually doing it. Your suggestion would have benn very useful. I am using oscdox with mopics.

I have it partially working now.

I looked at the images folder on the server side......to my surprise most of the images were absent. So uploaded images from my backup. Now, i see the product images( however, some of them show up only partially).

I still cant see the category and subcategory images....infact, i dont see a column for those in EP.

ALso, I noticed that html shows up in the product description

So my questions now are 1)is there way to to put category images through EP 2) why are images showing only partially 3) Can I use html for product description when working with EP.

Thanks for your prompt response!

[red_fraggle]

Nope, the cat and sub-cat images are not handled by EP.

What do you mean by images showing only "partially"

and lastly,
Yes you can use html as long as you remember to comment the Mysql escape characters. In our experience Its best to NOT use html in the descriptions, and instead make custom classes in the style sheet for product descriptions.

[Christy]

thanks again. By partially I mean= only part of some of the images shows up. or they shw up distorted.
I wouldnt know how to set up claases for description.

Thanks very much. I appreciate it

[red_fraggle]

This is a common issue we hear alot. The image size for displaying product thumbnails is set to a fixed width and hieght. If you set the width to be 80 pixels in admin > configuration > images then ALL product images display at that width and sometimes this can cause the ones with non standard widths and hiegths to look distorted. The best way to handle this is to only set the "width" in admin and leave the heigth blank, this will make osc use a proportional size and cut down ALOT on the stretching and pulling.

It helps to run all your images through a thumbnailer like Macromedia Fireworks or similar, something which can batch process to get all your images the same width and a proportional hiegth, this make them all look nice in OSC when you leave the "hiegth" blank.

[Christy]

I realized that only category and sub-category pics were distorted and it was because I had used smaller size pictures . Pictures are working fine now.

Now the only thing I need to figure out is how to work with attributes. When I look at the EP file in excel.....it seems so confusing. I wonder if there is any documentation available.

[red_fraggle]

lol, good luck......documentation is poor and it still doesnt handle attributes well.

first tip - delete all columns from your flat file you know you dont use.

second tip - manually put in all categories, put one product in each then download EP file and look in excel for structure.

[Christy]

Those are some excellent tips...I will try those. Thanks very much.

Christy 0