AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Hello everyone,

I'm trying out AC7 for the first time. I've been using 5.5 asp.net for about a year now. I'm interested in exporting my products and inserting them into a test version of AC7 on a new server to see how it all works. If I buy AC7, I would prefer to do a fresh install on a new server and avoid upgrading from 5.5 to 7.

Ive been lurking around, but haven't found info on this. Do I need to use a utility? I'm not sure where to start...

Obviously, I'd also be interested in making the images work as well...

Able has provided a utility to do this and they have improved it a couple of times. With the current one, you won't be able to export kits. I'm not sure if they have it yet to where it won't re-number orders, but you can keep the products and category ids the same.
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=5707
It did our store pretty well, except we had to move categories around and couldn't do kits.

Thanks for the info. I'll be sure to check it out. How do the pictures get handled?

Please visit following thread for details related to DataPot. ( A utility tool provides functionality to import AC5x data to AC7 stores and much more.)

viewtopic.php?f=42&t=5707&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

caraudiovideo wrote:Thanks for the info. I'll be sure to check it out. How do the pictures get handled?

The image paths are updated while importing from AC5x to Ac7. If the image paths are abolute URL's (i.e. startting from the http:// or https:// ) then these are preserved.

The image folder in AC7 is "~/Assets". This way if your previous image path was: then it will become in AC7: This means you simply need to copy your product images to ~/Assets directory.

I know that I can setup subfolders under the "Assets" folder, for instance Standard, Thumbnail, Swatches, etc, but how do I get the image to upload to subfolders based on their respective sizes in the administration area? It seems that all images are uploaded into the root without allowing you to specify a subfolder.

You can do it from Manage-->Images.

How should I specify the (standard) image field "ImageUrl" for the products
when importing the .csv file?

pic1.gif or ~/Assets/pic1.gif ? thanks

Here is one of ours since we use subfolders:
~/Assets/pimages/g/Gun-PM-EfrcEXT2k4-Bl.jpg

If I just leave it as "pic1.gif", will it default to the Assets folder?

Is this image stored in your ImageUrl field as

"/pimages/g/Gun-PM-EfrcEXT2k4-Bl.jpg" ?

If you leave it as pict1.gif, it will default to the assets folder.

Is this image stored in your ImageUrl field as

"/pimages/g/Gun-PM-EfrcEXT2k4-Bl.jpg" ?

No, in the admin it appears as I posted it.
~/Assets/pimages/g/Gun-PM-EfrcEXT2k4-Bl.jpg

My question wasn't worded correctly. OK, so I went to Manage>Images and Assets. I was able to create two folders, one for Standard and the other for Thumbnails within the ProductImages folder. I resized my images and uploaded them to their respective folders manually. (Interestingly, you cannot move images from one folder to another via drag and drop.)

I went to my products in the catalog area and used the "Advanced Image Options" to choose the images I wanted for each size of the product. This is quite tedious and not what I had expected. Ideally, I want to upload a standard image, resize it, and automatically place them in their respective folders path based on its size. I should also have the ability to set those default paths from manage images. I guess AbleCommerce prefers to organize images into one folder with a suffix added to them. I find this very inflexible.

AbleCommerce has its own standars when uploading product images, You can use two ways to upload product images:

1. From Catalog -> Edit Product -> Images and Assets -> Upload Image. Using this way the thumbnail and icon image for the product will be auto created and associated with the product.

2. From Manage -> Images and Assets, Navigate to "Product Images" folder. Browse you image for upload. Select "Standard Image Sizes" from Image Options and click upload (Using the Standar Image Sises option will resize the image and will also create thumbnail and icon images). Now the images are uploaded and you can associate the image to product from Catalog -> Edit Product -> Images and Assets -> Pick or Edit Images page.

You can change the standard image sizes from "Admin -> Website -> Logo and Images -> Default Image Sizes" section.

The auto generated thumbnail and icon image names are postfixes by "_t" and "_i" respectively. For example if you image name is "myimage.gif" the thumbnail and icon image names will be "myimage_t.gif" and "myimage_i.gif".

It is recommended to use the AbleCommerce conventions to avoid conflicts or complexity. The original image, thumbnail and icon images are all saved at the same location.

Naveed, does the auto-recognize code work for .gif files? I think it just worked for .jpg before.

OK. This is what I've been doing all along. So I guess you can't specify a path for an image based on its size automatically. Thanks for the advise.

jmestep wrote:Naveed, does the auto-recognize code work for .gif files? I think it just worked for .jpg before.

Yes, it works.
Only the Quality Option is specific to .jpg files.

joebeazelman wrote: So I guess you can't specify a path for an image based on its size automatically.

If you want that the product images are automatically associated to respective products, then you can enable "Product Image Lookup by SKU" feature from "Website -> Logo and Images -> Product Image Lookup by SKU" section.

When this option is enabled, product image URLs are automatically calculated using the SKU if no image is otherwise specified. The expected format is ?_i.jpg for icons, ?_t.jpg for thumbnails, and ?.jpg for standard images.

So, in this case if your product SKU is Product1SKU then the image look up feature will look up images from "~Assets/ProductImages/" folder with names Product1SKU.jpg, Product1SKU_i.jpg and Product1SKU_t.jpg for product, icon and thumbnail images respectively.

This way you just have to upload images and these will be auto associated with products if no images for these products were specified.