Printify mockups not grouped with variant photo when published

[PRINTED4U]

Hello! Is there a way to force Printify and/or Shopify to group mockup photos with each variant photo? For example, if I have a phone case design that I put on 10 different models of phone, Printify generates 4 mockups per phone model in addition to the 10 main product images. When the design is published, the main product photos all appear together and the 40 mockups all appear at the end of that list. Clicking though the photos in the image browser on the product page on my store will correctly and sequentially show the different phone models in the same order as they appear in the variant list, but the mockups associated with each phone model all appear at the end of the primary product photos. This makes no sense. No customer can be expected to click through all of the "title" photos to try and find the mockups that go with that phone. I need to be able to have each title photo followed by all relevant mockups, then on to the next title photo and its mockups and so on. It's nearly impossible to rearrange all of those mockups by hand without screwing up the order somewhere and ending up with, say, a title photo for an iPhone 13 next to mockups for an iPhone 11. Confusion would abound. How do I get each title photo to be followed by its associated mockups???

[paedii4565]

I have the same problem. Only happens with phone cases on printify. For clothing I get the right mockup to the right color. Hope they fix it soon.

[tydonk]

So this has been driving me crazy.  This is the best solution I have found and it's only for Dawn 8.0-11.0 though some people commented it works with other themes too - How To Show Only Selected Variant Images - Shopify Dawn Theme (websensepro.com)

It only works with "Desktop Layout" set to "Stacked" under the Product Information section, carousel and thumbnails do not work.  You'll need to change this setting first in order for the code to be generated properly.  Also the tutorial line numbers are correct so I recommend watching the linked YouTube video and looking at the code where he adds it.  You can then search for the string and find where to place it.  The real pain though is adding the alt text because when all the images load they load together and if you can't distinguish between the images it's pretty much impossible.  For color variants this works but I'm using canvas wraps which have size variants so there is no way to tell the difference between the image for 6x6 and 30x30.  I hope that helps.

[PRINTED4U]

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m not sure I want to mess with the code to address this. I’ve added lots of other stuff to the code, but this seems like something Shopify could easily handle with some image tags and sorting algorithms. Not sure why they haven’t done so yet, as this is a huge pain to wait 15+ minutes for something to publish because 100 or so unwanted mockups are getting uploaded. That’s a huge and unnecessary strain on their systems, too. It’s actually a problem on several fronts: 1) You can’t have multiple variants, but only one set of mockups. It generates a mockup for every single variant. 2) Those mockups are then all stuck at the bottom of the product photos rather than grouped with the appropriate variant. 3) Once you have over 100 mockups you don’t need, you can’t shift + click to select them. You have to laboriously delete them one at a time. Their answer at this point is to subscribe to an app that will let you do a better job of managing photos than their own app, however those apps don’t do what we users need, either. We’re stuck waiting for the Shopify developers to make their app behave the way users actually engage with it in real life.

[tydonk]

I agree 100%.  It does seem it's on the Shopify end but I opened a request with Printify to see if they can assist.  Maybe do the same if you haven't already, the more voices they hear the more likely they are to act.  It's pretty ridiculous that Shopify doesn't handle this out of the box as it's a very common need.