Bulk Lister Image Issue

David Lirette

I am having issues with web hosted images when using bulk lister. I had a couple of images reversed and noticed it when reviewing my uploaded listings. I ended those listings, corrected the image names, ftp the new images to my website and used bulk lister for loading the listings again. The listings still contained the old images. I assumed cache was a factor and waited a few hours and tried again and still had the issue. Now 3 days later, I tried again and still get the wrong image. If I pull up the url for my image that is in bulk loader, the correct image shows. What could be causing this issue 3 days after change the original files?

Mark Rosenberg

You are correct, that currently we do not re-download external images with the same names. You could get around this by either changing the name of the file, or appending a query string to it, for example sample.jpg?new=1

David Lirette

I use the catalog number as the file name and as a result, any duplicate will always have the same name. I will have to reload all of my store to ensure that the image displayed is the correct one.

David Lirette

I am having issues with images not showing current image when using the ?new=1 suffix to an image url. I am using bulk uploader for the listings. Some are previously sold, some ended when sold elsewhere and a duplicate is listed. In each situation, the name of the old and new image are the same.

Mark Rosenberg

Currently we do not re-download external images with the same names. So if you previously used sample.jpg, we would not download it again. If you then used sample.jpg?new=1 we would download the file again - but only once. If you used sample.jpg?new=1 again, we would not download the image again. You would need to change the query string you are appending to the image again.

You could, for example, append the date, such as sample.jpg?new=2018-10-21 and just change this each time to the current date, so that you are always providing a different url for your images.

David Lirette

This has become a nightmare that I'm not sure if it is worth keeping the store because of all the image problems that could be lurking. I have to decide if I'm going to delete all my listings again or not since I have no idea if the images are correct. I don't understand why when the image has a different date or size as the previous, it is not reloaded.

Mark Rosenberg

The Bulk Lister does not support re-using the same exact URL for different files when using remotely hosted images.

The reason why the Bulk Lister does not support this, is because many Sellers manage their inventory on HipStamp by uploading their entire inventory on a periodic basis and use the Bulk Lister to automatically add/close/update any applicable items. So, for example, if a Seller has 50,000 listings, and uploads their file once a day, if we re-downloaded images, we would need to re-download all 50,000 images, which would not be an efficient use of our resources.

Since the images in question are specifically ones which are remotely hosted, it's not possible to check the date or size, without first downloading the entire image - which we do not do per the above reasons.

There are many different ways you can ensure you're not re-using the same exact URLs. Use a different naming convention, place your images in different folders, append unique query strings, etc.

David Lirette

Using a different name/folder structure does not work for my inventory. Since I don't understand query strings, I have no options to handle this.

Mark Rosenberg

Keep in mind that we are only referring to the images you are uploading to your online server. So, for example, if you are about to upload 10 new listings, you could just place the images for those 10 specific listings in a separate folder on your online server. Alternatively, you could also upload those images directly to our Bulk Lister's Image Manager service, in which case you do not need to worry about the name's of the images. When using this approach, you simply enter the name of the image in your CSV file, such as image1.jpg, and before you upload your CSV file you just upload these images to the Bulk Lister's Image Manager. For more information on this, see the Bulk Lister help page, and/or watch the video tutorial: https://support.hipecommerce.com/portal/kb/articles/bulk-lister-instructions

With regards to using unique query strings appended to your URLs, this should be relatively straight-forward. Appending a query string is just adding a question mark, followed by any text. This allows you to create unique URLs, but for the same underlining image. So for example:

Let's say that today, 2018 October 22 (20181022) you are going to upload a new Bulk Lister file. For each of your image URLs in your Bulk Lister file, instead of using:

https://www.example.com/image1.jpg
https://www.example.com/image2.jpg

use:

https://www.example.com/image1.jpg?20181022
https://www.example.com/image2.jpg?20181022

That's it. You are now providing a unique URL that you have not used before to the Bulk Lister, and it will download that image. Your server will still supply the underlining image, so if you have recently updated the image, that's the one that will be used. The next time you upload a new file, just make sure within the file itself, you're updating the URLs to use the current date, then you will never reuse Image URLs, and you will not have any issues.

Luree Hughes

Mark, how long is our URL for images stored in your data base? A month, 6 months, a year?

Mark Rosenberg

When you provide a remote Image URL to an image stored on your online server, once your listing is processed, we then download the image from the remote Image URL and store it on our own server. This is done indefinitely.

Luree Hughes

Okay, I reuse the image URL every year. So far all listings have been good. I was just wondering.

David Lirette

I am able to create a unique URL now. It seemed like the parms were really used, but now I understand it is ignored and just used for uniqueness. I ran a test where I append the date and time to ensure I have a unique value.