Hi,
I had a file of ‘draft’ products exported that I was doing some work on. I accidentally when using the ‘find and replace’ tool, altered my product handles, which of course when I then imported - sent everything nuts and I ended up with double a whole bunch of products… I decided that because I had the CSV file here, I would DELETE all of the drafts, and re-import the file with all of the data.
It is failing because the product photos have all deleted and can’t be found.
What do I do? How do I make this work? Do I need to manually go in and add all of the photos again?
I thought this was the whole point of backing up products with a csv file…
Help!!
Replying to myself because I forgot to load the failure email for reference…
Did deleting the products delete all of my photo files too?
Hi, @BelK-AWCC
When you deleted the draft products, Shopify also deleted their associated images from the CDN (hosted URLs). These image URLs in your CSV are now pointing to files that no longer exist — which is why you’re seeing the “file not found” errors. The CSV file saves the links to images, but not the images themselves — it doesn’t “back up” the files, just the reference.
What you can do now:
1）Upload all your images into Shopify Files (Content > Files)
2）Get the new image URLs from there
3）Update your CSV’s column with the new links
4）Re-import
Hope this help.
