GazChap's WooCommerce Auto Category Product Thumbnails

Description

By default, WooCommerce will only show thumbnails for categories if the category has a thumbnail set.

This plugin changes this behaviour so that WooCommerce will hunt for a product thumbnail in the category being displayed, and use that instead.

Upon activation, the plugin will configure itself with the basic settings. Any categories that you have on your WooCommerce store that do not have a thumbnail set will then start displaying any available product thumbnails inside the category.

There are a number of options, these can be found in WooCommerce -> Settings -> Products -> Auto Category Thumbnails.

• Thumbnail Size sets the image size that the plugin should use when displaying the thumbnails. Defaults to shop_thumbail, but shop_catalog may be a better option for some themes.

• Go into Child Categories makes the plugin look in child categories too, useful if you have products buried in quite a deep category structure.

• Random Thumbnail tells the plugin to pick a random product thumbnail from those it finds every time the page loads – otherwise it always uses the first one it finds.

• Use Transients tells the plugin to save the thumbnail it picks for a category as a transient in WordPress, so that it won’t have to do it again while the transient is still active. This can hugely increase performance on sites with many categories, so is enabled by default.

• Transient Expiry is the length of time each transient is active for before the site picks another thumbnail for the category. By default it is set to 1 day.

• Custom Transient Expiry can be used to define your own transient expiry period (in seconds) if none of the pre-defined options are suitable.

• Exclude Thumbnail IDs accepts a comma-separated list of attachment IDs from the WordPress Media Library. The plugin will never use any thumbnail with one of these IDs for a category.

License

Licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0

Reviews

Rescue for stores with a large number of categories

N.g July 13, 2024

Great plugin, thanks!For stores with a large number of categories, this is a lifeline. I’m using the theme Woodmart, and yes, the images in the category shortcodes are doubled, and I hope that the developer will have time to somehow make compatibility. But for now this can be solved visually: .wrapp-category .category-image-wrapp a img:nth-child(2) { display: none;}

Did work for long time, but not anymore after update

elgreco1988 December 16, 2022 1 reply

Hello, I really liked this plugin, but after I believe the Woocommerce update, this plugin is not working anymore. None of the thumbnails are showing anymore and I even can’t reinstall the plugin (plugin isn’t getting activated at all). Please try to fix it in a next update. WooCommerce version: 7.2.0

best plugin

jawas August 11, 2022

best plugin just no update and image default catégorie visible

Smart code & works smoothly

nicoter January 23, 2022 1 reply

Even when products with stock all have no images it will take an image from an out of stock product which contains an image. Well done. Thank you for saving me a lot of time.

Doesn’t Work for Me

lexa30 December 1, 2021 7 replies

Thank you for awesome idea and coding! But I wonder if there is debug mode or working log? Because it is not work for me on WP 5.8.2 / WC 5.9.0, more than 600 categories….

Worth trying!

mathiasmottus November 18, 2021 1 reply

We have about 200 subcategories in our store (38 000 products) and wouldn’t have imagined to set these category pictures one-by-one.. So just “googled” for the plugin and found the perfect one. Thank you so much!

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

1.5 (21/06/2023)

• Declared support for WooCommerce High Performance Order Storage. Thanks to benatherton for the information.

1.4 (25/01/2022)

• Added checks into the activation hook so that existing options are not reset on plugin activation

1.3.1 (25/08/2020)

• Fixed an undefined variable notice error

1.3 (14/08/2020)

• Added options to have the plugin use WordPress transients to improve performance on subsequent page loads
• Added option to have the plugin ignore certain thumbnail attachment IDs while looking for thumbnails to use

1.2.1 (24/02/2019)

• Updated the notice shown if WooCommerce is deactivated to include the plugin name

1.2 (27/03/2018)

• I’ll be honest, I can’t actually remember what changed here and I didn’t start tracking on version control until after this!

1.1 (23/03/2018)

• Added option to set the image size used for the automatic thumbnails.

1.0 (05/10/2017)

• Initial release.