How to Best Organize/Manage Photos and Files

[RH_TB]

Hi All,

Thank you in advance for assistance. My company is in the process of transferring our store from another platform to Shopify. So far I am very impressed but having difficulty believing there is really no way to organize photos/files. My company has thousands of product photos and hundreds of "general" photos used on various other pages throughout the site. In the past, I have been able to upload files and store them in different folders making them easy to find. When I upload the photos to Shopify, I am not seeing any way to organize them or find what I need. If I end up uploading my thousands of photos I would spend hours trying to locate the correct photos.

How do all of you organize your photos/files? Is there a good app that will help with this?

[Karlie]

Hey, there! 

Karlie here from the Shopify Guru Team! Currently, there isn't a way to manage your image files from your Shopify Admin by sorting or organizing - but I can definitely see how this type of functionality would be beneficial for Shopify merchants. I would be happy to pass this feedback along to the appropriate team here for you so that we can help improve the Shopify platform for future merchants. 

Although there isn't an organizing system for image files already in place within Shopify, I would be happy to share some ideas that could potentially be work-arounds for the functionality you're looking to achieve. Because you had mentioned the use of an app in your post, I thought I would mention the app, Image Manager. Image Manager wasn't created purely for organizing images, but you do have the ability to sort and filter through your images by using Image Manager.  With Image Manager, you can also bulk upload images, drag and drop images to product and variants as well as filter products. 

Another option would be to export your products to CSV files. Exporting your products via CSV file would allow you to view all of your product information, including image file URLs in a spreadsheet format - which you could use to manually sort that information. If you're interested in this method, you can check out how to upload files to your website by using our handy doc and then you can review how to use CSV files, here!

I understand that this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but I hope this helps provide some sort of work-around for you. If you have any further questions - be sure to ask and I would be happy to help!

Karlie
Shopify Guru
support@shopify.com

[RH_TB]

Awesome, thank you for this information. I appreciate you taking the time to address my question. I do think passing this on to the appropriate team would be a great idea because I can't imagine I am the only one with this frustration.

Thanks again!

[BCPablo]

I just want to add that this is an important issue for me as well. I'm investigating the possibility of using Shopify, and this could be a problem. Aside from having over 2000 products, we have hundreds of additional photos and PDFs that we use throughout our site. Not having an efficient way to organize them will be a big problem. I'll investigate the idea of using an app for it, but it really should be part of Shopify's basic functionality.

[DebVT]

I agree this is a big issue if you have a large number of products and pages.  Can you delete a file once you have used it and no longer need it in the library, or does that remove its visibility on the web page?

[Hard_Bar]

Completely agree.

The fact that product imagery management would be such a time intensive option operation is the reason my clients with larger inventories won't switch over. They're not big enough stores to afford Shopify plus which may offer more functionality but still at $299 a month for the advanced package it's a shame there is not a more intuitive option.

Look forward to hearing if anything changes.

[Nancy12]

This post is almost a year old, and I still don't see a way to organize images.  Can you update on where this enhancement is in the product development life cycle?

[DebVT]

The only workaround I have found is to use Settings>Files which stores all of the images.  You can then search by name for a specific file.  This works fine if your images are named well but that's not always the case especially if they are sourced from vendors.  It also supplies the URL if you want to upload via URL.  Hope that helps.

[cmyers1979]

BCPablo,

DON'T DO IT!!!!! We rebuilt our website and my boss decided to move from Magento to Shopify (it appeared to be the less expensive option) IT'S NOT! You have to purchase monthly subscriptions to app to make ANYTHING function properly. And I chose a very robust theme.  Don't get me started on managing images and making bulk edits... oh and filtering your products or adding extra data? Hire $$$$$$$$$$ an expert. There is nothing and really do mean nothing intuitive about this platform. Oh and the customer service? Good luck with that. I really hope you have not bit the bullet yet. We are too deep in $40,000 to back out now.

[BCPablo]

Thanks for the info. We haven't made the switch as of yet. Your figure of around $40,000 sounds close to the estimates I've heard so far to move our site over. Thankfully, we don't have a pressing reason to move at the moment, so we have plenty of time to consider our options. Since I'm the one that deals with product page setup and image management at my company, it's important for me to actually be able to manage those images efficiently.