Bulk product and image upload

[alanrichardtex]

 So i have a file with about 2000 products that are ready to be uploaded with the correct format. 

I also have some folders with images for the products. The images filenames match the varient ID to help make the upload correspond with eachother. 

I also added a colum for img src and added a link for the the image link will be once uploaded. for example 

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0256/1078/0746/files/2020SIR-33.jpg 

now what i noticed is when i upload the file, it does pull the correct image, but it creates a duplicate image and adds a bunch of charaters to the end of the file name..

So how can i get it to upload without creating duplicate images or if there is just a better way to do this?

(in the attached image you can see the two products i tested it with. and how it made duplicates of the images and added those to the products i uploaded, rather than adding the original images.)

[farid-movsumov]

@alanrichardtex, if you upload the same image file twice, Shopify will add some random characters to the end of the image name to make it unique. I guess in your case, you attached the same filename to multiple variants in the CSV file, which is why the same image is being uploaded several times and duplicated. I would search for this image filename in your CSV and try to see if it appears multiple times.

Do your image filenames also match your SKU or Barcode?

[Ozkan]

Hi @alanrichardtex , I hope you're doing well! 

Do you use SKU or Barcode fields for products/variants, which are related to image names? 

[Craftware]

IMO this is the safest behavior for Shopify to perform in case you need to update the image for a particular product but leave the rest as is. However, this can make it harder to keep images up to date especially if they will never diverge.

For such cases, you could add the product name as a prefix to the file name to differentiate between them better. If you don't want to do this manually, we've built a file manager app that automatically does this for you depending on the folder the image, video or file is in - https://apps.shopify.com/simple-file-manager.

This way you can organize the multiple copies of the same image by products. You simply need to create a directory, name it the same as the product and the app will update it for you automatically. Here's a short tutorial of the same - https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-apps/update-product-media-in-a-jiffy-with-simple-file-manage...

Also, the app has a feature to update all duplicate images with a couple of clicks if your store requires the same image to be repeated across products but is frequently updated.