bug: thumbnail support enabled but thumbnails not used

Hi

I replied in a private mail.

Best,
Thomas

I am also having problems with thumbnail support. I have been looking for a product catalogue plugin and this seem to fit the bill in most respects. I may need the premium version before I go very far, but I am not prepared to pay for that if I can’t get the basic to work.

If I understand it correctly, the “thumbnail support” doesn’t actually support the thumbnail sizes as set in WP media settings – rather it supports the “medium” size image. Moreover, it only seems to support square images at 300×300 (I do not want to rename all images on my server).

It seems that this should be a relatively easy bug to fix if the plugin used the thumbnail image size rather than medium, at least the thumbnail would always be the exact size and could be set to 300×300 in WP media settings.

When might it be resolved?

Richard

Hi

No you are getting it wrong i guess, the point is that the thumbnail images need to have the “300×300” extension in the end but can have any dimensions you want e.g. 200×300 (because you would need to crop certain images otherwise).

The issue that i’m having is that i have created the thumbnails by myself (using a self written program that processes every “main” image and creates the thumbnails withouth destroying the image ratio), then uploaded all my thumbnails to the directory where the main images are.
Although thumbnail support is enabled (i have the pro version) the thumbnails are not used. Work is still in progress where the problem is, i’ll report once i know.

It would be much better if the plugin could read the thumbnail size used in WP media settings and use that. I would also like a 3:2 ratio and we can’t be alone. I would have thought that should be a relatively easy fix. Having to rename files on the server seems a nonsense.

I could easily use Lightroom or similar to create the thumbnails and name them …300×300 (irrespective of size) and upload them direct to server, but not sure how I then get them into the Media library (I’m relatively new to WP). Anyway, the plugin should work!

Certainly won’t be buying any pro-version unless this can be fixed and made more flexible.

To my knowledge the plugin is independant of the media gallery. What i did is directly import the files via FTP and then use the filesnames to point to the images (i used csv/xlsx mass-upload which is supported by UPCP).

The images don’t show up in the media gallery if directly uploaded by FTP but they are plugins out there which can syncronize the WP media gallery afterwards.

Just updated the plugin and the bug seems to be fixed – at least in part. Well done Etoile Web Design.

The plugin now takes the actual “medium” sized image, even if it’s not square. Still think it would be better if it took the thumbnail image (which is what it says), but at least it now works and we have some control.

If this is indicative of the support, then I shall probably upgrade to the pro version (though I will pay around with the free one for a bit first).

Thank you.

Hi Richard,

You were very quick to update and note the fix! ?? We were indeed able to apply a fix that makes it use the medium-sized version of the main image for a product, and make the thumbnail support work as intended. There are two reasons we didn’t want to use the thumbnail size. The first is that the default for the thumbnail size is 150×150. The default width for our thumbnails is 180px. And some users use custom CSS to make them even bigger than that. So, using the 150×150 would make it so that the images are blown up a bit, which would affect the quality of them. The second reason is that the WordPress thumbnail size is a cropped square, which can be limiting for some users’ customizations (which was also a limitation of our previous iteration, which we wanted to rectify).

Hi

It still doesn’t work on my site, the thumbnails have been created correctly and the UPCP option is enabled but the thumbnails are not used ??

Hi Thomymaster.

Not sure why your setup should not be working. The updated plugin works fine for me. Could it be your theme? I am using Pinnacle theme. Perhaps try default theme?

The UPC now takes the “Medium size” image as set in wp-admin/settings/media. In my case, this is set to 450×300 and it loads the image “pathname/imagename-450×300.jpg”. However, this ONLY applies to the basic catalogue image. The images loaded in the product view (even the thumbnails) are all the full-sized image. Presumably this is to allow for rapid response with the lightbox feature. Anyway, in product view there will only be a few images loaded, whereas in the catalogue (once I get it set up) there will be many hundreds to load.

Hope this helps. If not, then I am sure the authors will help you out – they have been really good so far.

Hi Thomy,

The issue you seem to be having is that you’ve transferred/uploaded your images directly into a folder at the following path: “/wp-content/uploads/product-catalogue/A4”, and then indicated to our plugin (when you imported via spreadsheet, for example) exactly where the images are located. The issue with this is that URL structure doesn’t follow WordPress convention and, as such, it unfortunately looks like WordPress can’t find the medium-sized file when it’s looking to display it for our plugin. If you upload the images directly into WordPress, they get placed in automatically-generated folders based on the month and year they were uploaded.

I have just read Etoile’s response to your problem. I don’t like the way that WP stores images in year/date folders either and also use my own folder system. The images for my catalogue are stored in folders such as wp-content/items/bowls, or wp-content/items/clocks, BUT I do use WP to upload the images. I have unchecked the option for WP to store in year/month folders, so it simply puts everything I upload into the wp-content/uploads folder. Once WP has uploaded the image, it “crunches” it to generate alternate sized images in this same folder.

I then use “Media File Manager” plugin to move them to the folder I want. The plugin only shows the original (full-size) images that have been uploaded, but moving them to my chosen folders also moves the alternate sized images, so the thumbnails end up in the same folder as the main image. UPC then seems able to find them and use them.

Hope that helps.

@etoilewebdesign

So you mean that it should work if i upload all images through WordPress (thus the medium sized images are created). All files are stored in /wp-content/uploads.

Then i instruct my spreadsheet to specify the files there prior to mass-import the data

Is this correct?
Best,
Thomas

Hi

This was the problem indeed. After having uploaded one image through the media gallery the thumbnails were created and used (i tried by manually adding a product).

Thanks a lot for your help!!!!

Best,
Thomas

Now that I have developed my site, I seem to be having the same problem. When I only had a few manually added test products, it all worked fine, but now that I have hundreds of products (so far), I have started using the spreadsheet upload and the catalogue no longer uses thumbnails.

I assume this is the same problem as above, as my images are also sorted into product folders, not month/date folders. Although each folder has the full sized images and all other size variants, UPC does not show the ‘medium sized’ image. The consequence is that the gallery take an age to load first time round. Subsequent times are faster as I assume the images are cached on my PC, but my concern is that as the catalogue grows, visitors will give up waiting for the catalogue to display. It will also be a real problem on mobile devices with poor bandwidth.

Can UPC not be set to load the medium sized image even if not in a month/date folder? I would have thought that most people using this plugin with more than a few hundred items would want to organize their product images more logically than the WP default.

Even if I were to revert to using year/month folders, it would make a nonsense of trying to rebuild part of the catalogue from a spreadsheet. At the moment, my spreadsheet has links to the images that all point to one folder, but to use the WP defaults, I would have to know which month each product’s image was uploaded!

Hope this can be sorted!

Hi Richard,

The plugin uses the link to the “medium” sized image created by WordPress, so it’s not really possible to link directly to the smaller images. If you set the images up so that WordPress knows where the medium sized image is, then the plugin should pull them correctly no matter where they’re located.