Images on computer with http: address

I am looking to move to the commerce plan so I can mass upload our products, but everything indicates I need a web address (http:) for my images.  Currently I take the pictures and the are sitting on my computer waiting for me to manually upload them.  How does one get these to have a web address?  Sorry but a newbie at this and looking for help

Thanks!!

Uploading the pics via the csv file is not required. It is generally used when you are importing from another platform and want to import images from there. You can leave the Hosted Image URLs column blank.

If the images are only on your computer then you can use the standard SS interface for editing products and upload the images that way.

If your images are organized say perhaps by product item in folders then you may want to use the Hosted Image URLs column. You could upload your files to a file storage service like Dropbox. Then copy the URLs into the CSV file.

I am currently loading everything one at a time but we have developed quite an inventory that we need to get on our website and I'm trying to decide if upgrading to commerce plan would make sense so I can do a mass upload.  The image thing is where I'm stuck since they don't url's assinged to them and trying to figure out how to solve for that easily....if that is possible.

So it sounds like I need to upload to a file storage service of some sort to make that work

You don't have to upgrade to the commerce plan UNTIL you need to go live with the store. In other words you can do all the importing, image loading, tweaking that you need before paying to upgrade.

The core question is will it be faster to upload all images first to a online file storage service then enter each of the URLs for each pic into the csv file. Or, faster to upload the images directly via the SS interface.

I would tend to think the latter would be faster. Unless, your images are highly organized to begin with by SKUs. Then you can bring word processors, spreadsheets or even some scripting into the mix to construct those URLs for the csv.

Creedon - thanks.  It does seem the image issue would be time consuming.

Thanks creedon, Very informative discussion.

On 10/22/2020 at 7:55 PM, creedon said:

Uploading the pics via the csv file is not required. It is generally used when you are importing from another platform and want to import images from there. You can leave the Hosted Image URLs column blank.

If the images are only on your computer then you can use the standard SS interface for editing products and upload the images that way.

If your images are organized say perhaps by product item in folders then you may want to use the Hosted Image URLs column. You could upload your files to a file storage service like Dropbox. Then copy the URLs into the CSV file.

hi!  i'm using the csv to import 300 products so if I could use the import sheet to upload photos, this would certainly be better than attaching each item manually.  I do have all my images in a dropbox folder (we had to work in the cloud to crop/pad our photos while our wireframe was built) but none of the url formats i tried so far have worked.  Having to create a "share link" for each item is equally if not more onerous than d/l to my hard drive & manually attaching each one individually.  I would much prefer to construct the format from the data already in the file if I could find a syntax the squarespace importer would accept...  Do you know of another way to use dropbox for hosted url's compatible with squarespace product import csv function?  TIA!

On 5/2/2022 at 4:29 PM, mikimia said:

Do you know of another way to use dropbox for hosted url's compatible with squarespace product import csv function?

A critical piece of the puzzle is getting access to urls of the raw files. Not all the viewer junk Dropbox and Google Drive like services wrap around those files to make it convenient for people to view them.

Taking Dropbox for example. You shouldn't have to share each file. If you share a folder with files that should be sufficient.

I click the Create link.

Load the folder up with some files.

Now use a private browsing window and paste the URL copied to the clipboard in the address bar.

You should see the list of files in the DB folder.

We still aren't there yet as we don't have the raw URLs for the files.

Please see Dropbox Files Download URLs.

When you select the bookmarklet it hopefully will copy URLs to your clipboard. If the folder you are viewing in DB has more than one page ( pagination ) then you'll need to run the bookmarklet for each page you want to grab the urls from.

I encourage you to do test runs with a few files first just to make sure the bookmarklet is working for you and really the whole process. There is nothing worse than working on hundreds of entries and then find that there was an error that could have been corrected early on in the process by doing a few tests.

Now to be clear if your files aren't highly organized to begin with then using the CSV technique may not be of much help effort wise. I've touched on this in other posts. Only you can decide which method will be least painful for you.

Let us know how it goes.

i finally figured out how to install the bookmarklet in chrome & the test sample worked beautifully!!! Just need to watch the order of the items of what you paste from your clipboard properly lines up with your product ID#s on your import sheet (mine was reverse order in the test)...  THANK YOU!!!

Mikimia - how did you install the bookmarklet in Chrome?

11 minutes ago, AliV said:

how did you install the bookmarklet in Chrome?

Here is a start on understanding Bookmarks.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/188842

A search on your favorite search engine will provide many articles on bookmarks.

Does this method still work? I tried using the bookmarklet but I don't seem to have anything copied in my keyboard. Did I miss something? 

5 hours ago, ttrockiryba said:

Does this method still work? I tried using the bookmarklet but I don't seem to have anything copied in my keyboard. Did I miss something?

You didn't miss anything. Dropbox made some changes and I needed to update my code. Thank you for reporting the issue.

From the changes...

• fix for changes in Dropbox css class name and other changes

You can replace the URL of the bookmark you created with the new code.

Let me know how it goes.