There are going to be times when you have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of images to add to your ProStores store. Maybe you’re adding a large number of new products, or your supplier sent you better images for your whole catalog. Perhaps you’re working on your site and need to upload all of the images for a new template set. Whatever the reason, if you are uploading them one by one in ProStores, a task like that can be pretty daunting. There is built in functionality to help make this task much easier, and this article will show you how to use it!
What I’m talking about is that in ProStores you have the ability to use the File Type option under Support > Upload Images in your ProStores administration panel. In the image below I’ve clicked on the dropdown to show the second option: Multi-Image Zip Archive
This is where it gets tricky. The system accepts zip files, but only if that file contains images and nothing else. Nothing. Not a folder, not several folders, not a “thumbs.db” file (generated automatically by Windows in image directories), nothing at all other than the images themselves.
Click Here to download Example #1. This example shows a properly constructed zip file that ProStores will accept
Click Here to download Example #2. This example shows a file which will be rejected – it contains a folder with the images inside.
This may take a little practice depending on what program you are used to using to create zip files. If you have never created one before, there’s no time like the present! WinZip and WinRar are both free programs that can produce ProStores-compatible zip files. Regardless of the program you use, the main idea to take away from this article is that you are zipping the images themselves only. If you’re adding a whole directory to the zip file it’s adding extra overhead and information to the file that ProStores can’t understand.
One last very important point I should make here is that this article as well as the Multi-Image Zip Archive functionality itself is only intended for PC users running Windows. Mac users running any version of OS X will not be able to produce zip files that are compatible with ProStores using any known software as the end result will always include structural files ProStores cannot handle due to the way the OS X file system is setup.
