Importing Images User Manual

CONTENTS

Introduction

Why might I want to import product and item images?

Why might I not want to import product and item images?

Importing product images

What exactly are “product images”?

How to import product images

Putting all your images into a ZIP file

Creating a CSV spreadsheet file

Ascertaining your products’ ID numbers

The Prod Ref field

Further notes about the CSV spreadsheet

Performing the import

Importing product option images

What are product option images?

How to import product option images

Ascertaining your product options’ Item ID numbers

Exporting your product options’ Item ID numbers

Exporting your product options’ ItemRef codes

Performing the import

Introduction

This manual will take you through how you can import images for your products and items. It assumes the reader already has some familiarity with Cybertill and Microsoft Excel (or an equivalent program). 

Why might I want to import product and item images?

If you want to sell your products through a website, you’ll almost certainly want to have your website display photos of your products, so that your online customers can see what the products look like. (After all, would you buy something from a website if you couldn’t see a picture of it?) 

If there are hundreds of products (or more) on your system that do not yet have images saved against them, it would take quite a long time to upload them “by hand” (i.e. one at a time). Consequently, you might find using Cybertill’s Image Import tool to be a faster way of getting those images in (and consequently onto your website). 

Why might I not want to import product and item images?

Although importing will probably be the fastest way to get images in (and therefore make the products on your website look good as quickly as possible), it’s arguably not the best way of doing it, because it doesn’t give you the opportunity to enter an image name or description. 

Let’s elaborate on that. When you add an image to a products or items “by hand”, you do so by filling in these boxes: 

So, as well as adding the picture, you have the option of typing in a “Name” for it. Whatever you put in there will become the image title.  This is useful because  

1. good, clear image titles might help your site’s ranking in search results, and 
2. in some web browsers, when your customers hover their mouse cursors over a picture, the image title will appear in a “tooltip” box, like this: 

It’s also useful to be able to specify a description (in the “Descr” field) because those descriptions will become something called the alt text (short for “alternative text”) for those images. This is good practice because, 

1. as with image titles, good, clear “alt text” content may help your ranking in search results, and 
2. some people (such as those with visual impairments or those who have low-bandwidth connections) may not be able to see images on web pages, and in such cases the “alt text” will be displayed (or even read out loud by screen reading software) to the customer instead. 

Instead of doing the above, if you use the tool to import your images, you don’t get the chance to set what those image titles and descriptions will be.  Instead, the file names of your images will automatically become the “title”, and there will be no “alt text” at all. 

So, if your products’ images are all currently saved with non-descriptive filenames such as “ABC12345.JPG”, then if you import those images, their titles will also be “ABC12345.JPG”, and their alt texts will be completely blank. This in turn will mean that although your website will look okay, it might not come up as high in Google searches as it could do, and nor will it be as usable by visually-impaired customers as it could be. 

(Still, you might feel that a website containing images with poor titles and no alt texts might be preferable to a website with no images whatsoever - in which case doing an import remains a valid solution.) 

Importing product images 

What exactly are “product images”? 

When customers are browsing through your website looking at what you sell, your product images are probably the first things they’ll see. 

In the following screenshot, a customer has clicked into the “Clothing” category of a website, and is now being presented with all the product images of the “Clothing” products:   

Be careful not to confuse product images with “product option images” (aka “item images”), which are different; product option images will only be visible when a customer clicks on a product for a closer look. So, in the above example, the customer won’t see the product option images for any of those products until they click on one of those products – and they’re not likely to do that unless those products have a good product image to catch their eye in the first place. (Usually, it’s only worth concerning yourself with product option images if your products come in several styles, and each style looks different; see later in this manual for more information.) 

If you try to sell a product that has no product image on a website, it probably won’t look very appealing. It’ll look something like this: 

Ask yourself, would I buy something off the internet if I couldn’t see what it looked like?  If the answer is “no”, then chances are your customers will feel the same. Hence, product images are rather important. 

How to import product images

To import images of this type, you’ll need to provide your Cybertill system with two things: 

• A ZIP file containing all the images
• A CSV spreadsheet file in which column A contains either the ID number or the “Prod Ref” of the products, and column B contains the filename of the images you want to attach to those products 

Let’s start with how to prepare the ZIP file. 

Putting all your images into a ZIP file

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a ZIP file is simply a kind of “container” file, into which you can put lots of other computer files.  It’s a great tool for taking lots of separate files (such as images) and squashing them into a single container. Doing that makes it easier to send those files from one place to another. 

In most versions of Windows, you will be able to follow a process like this to put your images into a ZIP file: 

• Start by opening the folder in which your images are kept, so you can see them all listed on screen like so: 

From here,  

• highlight all the images you want to put in your ZIP file.   

If you want all the pictures,  

• press CTRL + A on your keyboard; that’s the shortcut to “select all”.  

If you want some but not all of them,  

• hold down CTRL on your keyboard, then click each picture in turn. 

Once you’ve highlighted them,  

• right-click on any of the highlighted images.   

A menu should appear that looks something like this: 

 

• Hover the mouse cursor over the “Send to” option.  

When you do so, further options will appear off to the side: 

• Click on the “Compressed (zipped) folder” option (indicated in red above). 

You’ll then be able to type in the name you want the ZIP file to have: 

By default, the system will try to give the file the same name as one of the images you had highlighted. Feel free to delete that name and type in something else as you see fit, and  

• press ENTER on your keyboard when you’re done. 

That’s how to make a ZIP file.  Next, let’s consider the other type of file we need: 

Creating a CSV spreadsheet file

As noted earlier, you’ll need to create a spreadsheet file in which column A contains either the “ID number” or the “Prod Ref” of the products, and column B contains the filename of the images you want to attach to those products. 

We’ll consider the ID number option first. 

Ascertaining your products’ ID numbers

Whenever you create a product in Cybertill, the system will automatically generate an ID number for it. They go up sequentially; chances are that the first ever product you created will have an ID of “1”, whereas the second will have “2”, the third “3” and so on. 

If you go into Admin, then Products and Categories, then find and click on one of your products’ names, it’ll take you into the editing screen for that product. You’ll also be able to see what that product’s ID number is by looking in the 

In the above example, that product’s editing page is on the following web address: 

ct55067.c-pos.co.uk/current/index.php/product/9/edit 

That number 9 is the product’s ID number. 

Looking up what each of your products’ ID numbers is in this fashion would take quite a long time. Fortunately, there’s another trick you can try; there’s a way you can pull a big list of all your products’ ID numbers out of the system quite quickly.   

If you go back to Admin then Products and Categories, you should find an option along the bottom of the page to Export products: 

Click that, and you’ll be taken to a screen like this:

▪ Don’t change anything and go straight to clicking the Export button at the bottom left. 

On the next page, 

• click Export again.

You will probably be prompted as to whether you want to “open or save” a file. If you were to open that file in Microsoft Excel (or an equivalent program), it should look something like this: 

So here, you can see the Product ID number, Name and Category of all the products on your system (amongst a couple of other things.) This is probably the most convenient way to see what your product IDs are. 

Note: if you try this same trick from within a category, it would only export the products that are inside that category or its subcategories. 

The Prod Ref field

Alternatively, you could make use of the Prod Ref field. 

• Go into Admin > Products and Categories, then find and click on a product’s name (as if to edit it).
• In the Other section of the editing screen, you’ll find a field called Prod ref: 

Unless this field has come to your attention before, it will probably be blank for all of your products at the moment.   

You have the option of using this field to set your own “product references” for each of your products if you wish. These references don’t have to be numbers, they can also contain text, and consequently you could make them more meaningful than the Cybertill-generated ID numbers. 

Whether it would be practical to do so, though, is up to you to decide. You’d need to take the time to input such a reference against all the products you wanted to import images for, in order to go down this route. Consider: If you’d have to click into each product to edit its Prod Ref before you can import the pictures, would it be any quicker than clicking into each product to upload an image against it manually? 

Note: it is possible to set the product references for lots of products at once through use of the Data Import Manager if you have that module. That makes it much more of a viable option. 

Further notes about the CSV spreadsheet

It’s important to bear in mind that the spreadsheet you create must only use either the product ID or the product ref. You can’t have a mixture of both in the same spreadsheet. 

Also, there should be no column headers at the top of the spreadsheet. The very first row should contain the first line of data. 

One other rule: In column B, you must be careful to spell the filename of your images exactly, and you also must ensure that you have put the correct file extension in too. Image files can have quite a few different extensions at the end (“.jpg”, “.jpeg” or “.png” being the common ones). 

When you browse the folder, your pictures are kept in, you might not be able to see immediately what file extension your image files have.  Following these steps should remedy that: 

• Click the Organize button at the top left. 

• Click Folder and search options

• In the window that appears, click into the View tab at the top. 

 

• Look for a line marked Hide extensions for known file types, and ensure it is not ticked. 

• Click Apply, then OK at the bottom 

If you follow these steps, then back in the folder you started from, it should show the extensions of your image files on screen now, looking something like this: 

(Note that depending on what version of Windows you’re using, there might be some small differences between the above screenshots and the way your computer looks.) 

You should now have access to all the info you’d need to complete the spreadsheet. Once you’ve completed the spreadsheet, it should look something like this: 

(That example contains product IDs in the first column.) 

Performing the import

Once you have got both your spreadsheet and your ZIP file prepared, you can carry out the import by going into Admin, then looking for the option called Image Import (normally about a quarter of the way down). 

• Upon clicking Image Import, you’ll be taken to a screen like this: 

Where it says CSV File*,

• click the Browse icon on the right.   

You’ll then be prompted to find your CSV file.   

• Find it and double-click on it. 
• Leave the CSV File Encoding* and CSV Field Separator* fields as they are; the default options in those boxes should be fine. 

In the ZIP File* line,  

• click the Browse button, then in the window that pops up, find and double-click your ZIP file. 

If you were to tick where it says, “Remove existing images first?”, the system would remove any images that were currently associated with the products referred to on your spreadsheet and replace them with the new images you were importing now.  So, you’d tick here if you were trying to replace old pictures with new. 

If you don’t tick that box, and you try to import an image into a product which already has an image, then the “new” image you were importing would be stored as an “alternate” or “secondary” image. 

(If none of your products have any images against them at all yet, it won’t make any difference whether you tick this box or not.) 

In the Key field* box,  

• you must choose whether column A of your CSV spreadsheet file contains id numbers or prod_ref codes. 

After completing all the above,  

• click the Run bulk upload button underneath. 

If you have put an image name into your spreadsheet which Cybertill cannot find in the ZIP file, it will tell you at this point.  You’ll see an error message like this: 

 

In cases like this, it won’t import any of your images. 

You’ll need to either correct your spreadsheet, or add the image to your ZIP file accordingly, before trying the import again. 

You should see a progress bar telling you how close the system is to completing the import.  When it’s all complete, it should look like this: 

To verify that the images have gone in as expected, it might be wise to examine a handful of your products to check.  It’s advised that you go back to Admin > Products and Categories. 

• Find and click one of the products in question.  
• If you then scroll down to where the “Image Upload” options are, you should see the image you imported just above them: 

If you can see the image you wanted in the Thumbnails section (like in the above example), your import worked. 

Importing product option images 

What are product option images?

Generally, product option images are only worth doing if both; 

1. you have created your products in different styles, and  
2. those styles look different. 

For example, if you have a product which comes in different colour variations (e.g. a T-shirt that comes in different colours), and you’ve used styles to create those variations, you’ll probably find it helpful to use product option images. 

Here’s an example of a product that has product option images which is being sold on a website: 

The large image at the top is the product image (as discussed in the previous chapter). The product option images are the smaller ones highlighted in red at the left.   

Note: Product option images don’t have to appear on a website in this exact format; there are a few different ways in which they can be presented, and this is an example of just one option. 

How to import product option images

You’ll need to prepare two things: 

• A ZIP file containing all the images you want to import. 
• A CSV spreadsheet file in which column A contains one of three things:  

1. the Item ID numbers,  
2. the ItemRefs, or  
3. the barcodes for the items in question, and column B contains the exact filename of the image to be used against each item. 

Note: for details on how to put images into a ZIP file “container”, please see the corresponding section in the previous chapter. 

You’ll probably be relatively familiar with ItemRefs by now; every item on your system will have one (normally in a 3-letter, 3-digit format), and it appears in quite a few different places (such as till receipts and stock / sales reports). You’ll probably also be quite familiar with barcodes as well. 

Item ID numbers aren’t quite so conspicuous, though; they aren’t displayed anywhere near as prominently. Whenever you create an item, Cybertill will generate an ID number for it. They go up sequentially, so the first ever item you created will have an ID of “1”, whereas the second will have “2”, the third “3” and so on. 

Ascertaining your product options’ Item ID numbers

Make your way into the screen from where you can edit an item’s prices. 

Two ways of doing this: 

• Go to Admin > Products and Categories 
• Find a product but don’t click on its name – instead, click the edit all link at the right. 
• Then click on the ItemRef for the item in question. 
• Use the SEARCH bar at the top right to find the item, and it should take you straight to the page in question 

Once you’re in that screen, you’ll be able to see what ID number Cybertill has generated for that item by looking very carefully in your web browser’s address bar: 

The number at the very end of the web address for that page will be the item’s ID.  (So, for the item depicted here, its ID number is 744.) 

Exporting your product options’ Item ID numbers

If you make your way into Admin > Products and Categories and go into one of your categories, you’ll see an option along the bottom of the screen to Export product options:   

If you click there, you’ll be taken to a page like this:

Unless you know what you’re doing,  

• you should probably go straight to clicking the Export button. 

You’ll be taken to another (much shorter) screen: 

Again, leave these options alone and go straight to the Export button.  

It’ll produce a CSV spreadsheet file listing all your items’ IDs and names, amongst a few other things. 

This is one way to get out your items’ ID numbers, but it might not be ideal, because it doesn’t tell you what styles each line represents. (Consider the Yoda T-Shirt example above; you can see in the above image that there are six different types of “Yoda T-Shirt”, but it’s not clear what size/colour each line represents.) 

If you’ve used styles a lot, you’ll probably find that another export is more useful: 

Exporting your product options’ ItemRef codes

There’s a report in the Stock menu called General Overview which will let you export all of your ItemRef codes, along with the names and – crucially – the styles of all the items on your system. 

You’ll probably find it about three quarters of the way down, in the Linear Reports section. 

When you click into it, you’ll be presented with a “Filters” page: 

If you wanted to, you could use any of the fields here to say that you only wanted to export items from certain categories, or brands, or seasons, amongst other things. 

• If you were to click into the Category box, you’ll then see a list of all your categories and subcategories, and you’ll be able to tick whichever of them you wanted to look at (see example to the right). 

If you wanted to look at all categories, 

• there’s no need to click into that box. If you leave all the “category” boxes unticked, the system will pull out the products in every category by default. (It’s the same principle with brands, seasons, or any of the other “filter” options here.) 
• If you then scroll down to the very bottom of the page, you’ll see a couple of “Group By” boxes:

• Click into Group by 2 and change it to “ItemRef”.

  (Leave Group By 1 alone; the default option of “Location” should be fine.)

 After that, 

• click the Generate button at the bottom left. 

You will then be presented with a list of results:

You’ll see all the ItemRefs, item names, and style info crammed into that first column.   

Note: the other columns in this report tell you things like how much stock you have of each item, and how many you’ve sold of them over a date range.  See the separate “Reporting Capabilities of Cybertill” for more information on this. 

You can now pull this info out of Cybertill and into a CSV spreadsheet file by, 

• clicking the Export to CSV button in the top right corner (indicated in red above). 

Upon clicking that, you’ll probably be asked whether you want to “open” or “save”.  

If you click “open”, you should see all the above data appear in Excel: 

This data still needs a bit of manipulation, though, before we can work with it. Currently, the item’s ItemRef, name and styles info are all squashed together into column B. We need to isolate the ItemRef code; we need to get that into a column on its own. 

Fortunately, there’s a trick you can do in Excel to separate out that info quite neatly. If you look closely at the data, you’ll observe that at the end of each of the ItemRef codes, there is a colon character (two dots, one on top of the other, like this -:).  We can use this. 

• Start by highlighting column B (which you can do by clicking directly on the “B”).  
• After that, click into the Data menu along the very top of the screen, indicated in red below: 

There should be an option within it called Text to Columns: 

Clicking that should make a “text to columns wizard” appear: 

Here, ensure you’ve got the Delimited option selected (as depicted above),  

• then click Next at the bottom right to go onto step 2. 

Step 2 will look like this: 

• You’ll need to put a tick in the Other tick box, and type a colon character (two dots, like this -:) into the little space just to the right. (On most keyboards, you can do this by holding SHIFT and pressing the key immediately to the right of the letter L.) 

By doing this, you’re ordering Excel to “look for any colons in column B, and if you find any, start a new column there” – i.e. so everything after the colon will be moved over to column C. 

• Click Next to proceed. 

The third page should look like this:

In the “Data preview” section at the bottom, the contents of the “Text” column should be highlighted in black (as depicted above). If they’re not,  

• click that column. 

Once that column is highlighted, at the top left,  

• you should choose the Text option (indicated in red above). 
• Lastly, click Finish. 

You might get asked whether you want to “overwrite any data”.  If so,  

• click “Yes” or “OK” (whatever the positive answer is). 

You should find yourself looking at the spreadsheet again, and column B should now contain just the Item Ref codes.  The items’ names and style info (if any) will have been scattered across columns C, D and maybe E (depending on how many styles your products use). 

It’s easy enough to now manipulate that spreadsheet so that the ItemRefs are in column A. You can then enter the relevant image filenames into column B, then delete all the other columns, and you’ll be left with a file suitable for importing. 

Performing the import

When both your spreadsheet and your ZIP file are ready, 

• go into Admin, then Image Import (normally a quarter of the way down). 

When that screen opens,  

• ignore the “Product Image Upload” section at the top; that’s not what we want. 
• Instead, scroll down.  

A short way down, you’ll find a section entitled ProductOption Image Upload. 

Where it says CSV File*,

• click the Browse button at the right.  

You’ll be prompted to find your CSV file. 

• Find it and double-click on it. 
• Leave the CSV File Encoding* and CSV Field Separator* fields as they are; the defaults should be fine. 

In the ZIP File* line,  

• click the Browse button, then in the window that pops up, find and double-click your ZIP file. 

If you were to tick where it says, “Remove existing images first?”, the system would remove any images that were currently saved against the items referred to on your spreadsheet and replace them with the new images you are importing.  So, you’d tick here if you were trying to replace old pictures with new. 

If you don’t tick that box, and you try to import an image against a product that already has an image, then the “new” image you were importing would be stored as an “alternate” or “secondary” image. 

(Note that if none of your items have any images yet, it won’t make any difference whether you tick this box or not.) In the Key field* box,  

• you must choose whether column A of your CSV file contains item ID numbers, Item Ref codes or barcodes. 

• Make sure to choose the correct one

After completing all the above,  

• click the Run bulk upload button underneath. 

If you then see an error message like this: 

 

…then in your spreadsheet, you’ve entered the filename of an image which does not exist in your ZIP file.  When this happens, none of the images will have been imported.  You’ll need to either correct your spreadsheet or your ZIP file accordingly, then try again. 

When the import starts to run, you’ll see a progress meter telling you what percentage of the job the system has managed to complete so far.  When it’s all complete, it should look like this: 

Afterwards, it’s usually a good idea to check out a few of your items, just to double-check the import worked properly.  Make your way into the editing screen for one of the items in question – i.e. the page from where you can edit the item’s prices and barcodes. (Probably the fastest way to do so would be to use the SEARCH bar at the top right.) Once you are there,  

• scroll down to where the “Image Upload” options are. 

You should see the image you imported just above them: 

If you can see the image you wanted in the Thumbnails section (like in the above example), your import worked.