File Manager Improvements

[JLynn]

I'd like to suggest the following for dealing with images...

Options to do both Large & Thumbnail resizing together (or even better - only importing/uploading one picture and having the program automatically create the batch & large images for you) - for someone like me that's always adding new products & images...this would be a huge help.

Options to choose multiple pictures from a "View All" screen in a particular folder - so that you could designate your 1,2,3,4 pictures on one page without manually having to go back and do each one at a time from your File Manager, Product detail pages OR doing a product detail import. Would be a big time saver to have a one page/couple click option for choosing images. Currently my image folders are divided and sub-divided into sometimes six folders so I only have to deal with a max of 2-3 pages (e.g. under my Earrings Category, I have various styles by product number, e1, e2, e3 - and each of these may have 200-500 images in them - so rather than deal with lots of pages, I've divided the sub categories for each 100 products as in Earrings/e2 with additional subs of e2-1-99, e2-100-199, e2-200-299, etc. Since I don't always remember the number of a particular product I'm looking for, the search bar although helpful in some cases, isn't always ideal.

After making changes on a page (whether it's resizing issues, editing), it would be helpful to remain on the same page versus being taken back to the first page in the folder.

Add "More Results <<| on the last page for folders (right now all the pages have this except the last page the products show on). Yes, the back button can be used, but I can't tell you the number of times I've tried to hit the "prior" arrow and it's not there

[cekman]

Working with images is time-consuming - especially if you're looking for a particular image in a list of hundreds.

One thing I've done is create an image folder called 'needthumbnail'.

I create my large pictures offline and do a batch upload to this folder. Then I select all the images in the folder and do a Batch Thumbnail Create.

Then I select all of the images again and move them to the folder I wanted them to end up in.

One thing I've noticed: I used to create my thumbnails individually in Frontpage and they were rarely over 3kb in size. Now they are usually 7-9 kb. I wish the overal size could be smaller - my bandwidth gets used up at an alarming rate.

[JLynn]

I did something similar - called it "editpics" - but many times after doing batch resizes of the small and large images and moving to the correct files, I would get errors when I moved them to their proper folder (as in images/bracelets/br1/br1-00004.jpg.jpg) - and if I tried to edit that particular name once in the correct folder, the system would take you through the process of editing the file name...but would never apply the change. So I deleted all my pictures and did the imports to their respective files - did batch resizing for large first (page by page), then batch resizing for thumbnails (all of the images - page by page) and then deleted the thumbnails I didn't want. My photos are taken with a Sony Cybershot at a low resolution...I upped my pixel size for thumnail to 250x250 I think and the majority of them are only 3-4kb right now, since my regular jpgs have been resized to 350x350 for the large image, they seem to be ~17-21kb. That is how they work right? Your images are imported in...and then you do a batch resize to the the pixel you specify and they are all resized? I mean the original images are hidden anywhere are they ?

At any rate, I'd love to see some improvements in the next version for images and file manager in the next version. Auctiva has a great picture manager in their program (I use them if I'm selling any personal stuff or overstocks on ebay).

But bandwidth with zoomify has to be an issue. I didn't have that with my other cart system (but as I said in another post...that was one of the few + they had going for them). Once I saw that your original pictures needed to be at a higher resolution and I had to work in the FTP files (which I've done but not with a whole lot of confidence and comfort), I realized I would never use because it would involve re-takes of 1,000 products or more.
J-Lynn