Update product media in a jiffy with Simple File Manager

[Craftware]

Hello Shopify Community,

We built Simple File Manager to make critical product and file management operations like:

• updating product images
• finding and adding new product images in the Products page
• updating a common image that is used across products

can be performed in a few seconds rather than minutes. To find out why we chose to solve this problem, scroll to the bottom of the post.

Demonstration

In this post, we're going to go over how and why Simple File Manager can be used to update your product images in a jiffy.

 

Problem

Say, we're updating a Snowboard product with better images to drive up conversions.

To update each of those images, we need to click the "Add more" or "+" button in the Media section and then either select existing files or upload new ones and associate them with the product.

For each image, that's about a few seconds to a few minutes depending on whether your files have a naming convention and if you can use the search feature to quickly find them.

You then need to reorder the images in case they were added and removed in the wrong order and this takes up a few more seconds before you can save the changes and the product update is live.

When we timed ourselves doing this, it took ~1 minute to update 1 product. It's not just replacing the images, the alt also needs to be copied over. If you perform 100 product updates on average in a month, you're spending 100 minutes a week just updating products. This is time you could've spent driving traffic to your business instead.

 

Alternative Solution

Now, you could shave some time off by updating the Files directly in Shopify Files. However, this requires knowing the names of the files to be updated, so you'll need to have the Products page open to lookup each image name in Shopify Files and then update them.

Quick question: I can't seem to find a way to replace files in the new Shopify Files UI. Has the feature been removed?

 

Solved with Simple File Manager

With Simple File Manager, you only need to be attentive when you set up the app.

Let's say I spend 30 seconds to find the files associated with the snowboard and move them all into a folder.

Notice how you can search by file prefix and move them directly from the search results. You will have had to create a directory beforehand but that's as simple as hitting "Create Folder".

In this new directory, you can upload the updated images but they should have the same name as the file they will be replacing.

The update itself took less than 2 seconds of your time and the 1 minute set up can be spread across the number of updates you perform. So if you were to update a product 5 times, you spent 17 seconds updating the product each time compared to 1 minute each time previously. That's almost a 4x speedup and no extra mental burden for you.

 

Why did we choose to solve this issue?

File management is a well discussed topic in this forum. Here are a few discussions I've found - [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]. Unfortunately, many of the solutions in these posts require significant manual effort to keep your offline files in sync with the files on Shopify CDN.

For example, one valuable piece of advice from a Shopify Partner to one of the above posts is to have a consistent file naming convention and to update regularly. While this works well when you have a few files, it is unlikely to scale as you expand your product listings and grow your business. As the number of images increases, so will your time to manage them which isn't an effective use of your time.

 

Coming up next

Finding and adding new images in the Products page that were uploaded on Simple File Manager.