Pictures mysteriously disappearing

[abradley]

I have discovered today, that we are having product images disappearing on us. If I click on the advanced settings in the images tab, the path to an image is listed for icon, thumbnail, and standard images... but they all show broken images. Upon FTPing to our server and inspecting the ProductImages folder, the images referenced in the path were indeed non-existent in the folder.

We have some products where all images are broken, we have some where only some images are broken (such as standard image existing but thumbnail and icon image non-existent)

I know for a fact that when the images were added to the products, they did show up correctly, we diligently check new products added. So at some point between creation and now, the images were deleted from the Assets/ProductImages/ folder. Any ideas on how?

[Katie]

Hello Austin,

I don't think that anything in the AbleCommerce code that would automatically remove your images from the /ProductImages/ folder. Do you keep a daily backup of your website files? I would make sure that your FTP hasn't been compromised. Something seems very suspicious and I would take some time to update all your passwords.

By chance, do you use the Image Lookup by SKU feature?

Have you ever used the Orphaned Items report page to remove images that are not associated to anything in the store?

Thanks
Katie

[abradley]

We don't have a security problem, we keep everything on lock and no one that we don't trust has access. We just updated passwords recently.

We did have the Image Lookup by SKU feature turned on (which I just disabled), but we explicitly attached all our images through the upload image on the product page. In advanced settings, the path for each image is explicitly defined. Images that are missing are not named with a sku.

We do have a LOT of orphaned images that just so happened to be named with the SKU, but we have not deleted anything with the orphaned report yet. I am about to go through and make sure all images we need are attached to products and start removing orphaned ones. It will be a lot of manual labor, but has to be cleaned up I suppose.

[sciencesight]

This happened to me early in December.

I had been editing a lot of product pictures and then dragging them into ../Assets/ProductImages using FileZilla. Suddenly I saw the whole folder had emptied. I was able to recover as I had copies all in one place. Pretty scary... but since I had quickly fixed the issue, I moved on without exploring whether it was operator error, FileZilla error, or what. Now I'm sure to keep an exact duplicate folder of all my product images ready to upload if it ever happens again.

Dave