Shopify - Bulk Inventory Update - Color Options for Images Problem

Topic summary

Main issue: Selecting a color option does not filter images; the left-side gallery keeps showing all product photos. The “Hide other variants” setting is enabled but has no effect.

Investigation: During a bulk inventory update/migration via CSV, the uploader assigned an image URL and position to each variant. After exporting from Shopify, images appear merged at the product level rather than tied to individual variants.

Observed anomaly: In the export, images labeled for a specific color (e.g., “pembe” = pink) link to a different color image (e.g., blue t‑shirt), suggesting variant-image associations were not preserved.

Hypothesis: Shopify’s handling of the import/export has removed or changed variant-level image mappings, causing the storefront to show all images regardless of selected color.

Status: No solution or actions confirmed yet; the poster requests guidance. Screenshots are central to understanding the mapping and are provided in the thread. Discussion remains open.

Summarized with AI on January 15. AI used: gpt-5.

if you select any colour option all the product images listed to the left, they remain the same, the first default images in order will show.
Hide other variants option is already toggled on, but yet still we see all the photos of the product including the other variants.

We checked to see how the photos are loaded with our csv inventory upload file, so we exported the inventory on shopify.

  1. Our Upload(csv)
  2. Shopify Export(csv)

On our upload file, products have variants and each variant has images url for itself. But on shopify export, i can see that shopify merged the urls, and it seems that the product photos are under the product now, not distributed to variants. Please check the screenshots as well for a better understanding of the issue.

  • Notes for Screenshots:
  • Each variant has its image url in our upload and has image positions.
  • In shopify export, we see that the images are uploaded to the product itself rather than the variants. As you can see, pembe refers to pink, but when clicked on the image url we see blue tshirt.
    *** THIS IS THE PROBLEM THAT WE THINK THAT CAUSES THIS PROBLEM, IT MIGHT BE STH ELSE. BUT YET STILL THIS PROBLEM ALSO WOULD CAUSE THE VARIANTS OF THE PRODUCTS NOT TO HAVE ITS OWN IMAGES.


Please let us know how to proceed, as we have this problem for a while now.