[Plugin: CSV Importer] Post Thumbnail

Hi Fahdi,

That’s great news. I’ve used CSV Import to populate a couple of large catelogue site but then had to manually go and set the Featured image for each product.

In all cases I use custom post types and custom taxonomies.

Basically what most people seem to want (going by the posts I’ve read here on the forum) is to upload all images thru the media library and then reference the image file names in a column in the CSV. If possible it would be great to have the ability to reference multiple images…. a whole gallery of images to attach to a post.

Is that enough information?

Being able to connect medial library images to products would certainly be a handy feature. I have worked on a number of affiliate store sites that receive products with image urls. Why force the extra step of uploading hundreds or even thousands of images via the media library?

So you suggest attaching images to posts based on urls and not the actual media library. Can you elaborate your needs based on your comment above. I think this can be done easily.

The only issue I would have with a URL approach would that I would want to use the ‘thumbnail’ version of the image in most instances. Altho, having said that I guess that would be dealt with in the page or post template.

The thing I really couldn’t figure out was the code that actually “attaches” an image (in the library or elsewhere) to a post.

Does WP use the url of the image when attaching an image to a page or post or does the image (in the library) have an id?

Sorry for the questions but I might as well take this opportunity to get my head around how this works as its been bugging me for months…

Hi Fahdi,

What I am wanting to import is an affiliate datafeed. This feed comes with product images hosted on their server and I would like to use them as the product image(s) and like hilmon I would like to have one column designated as the post thumbnail.

I agree with James Callaway above. Exact same requirements here.

fahdi: Release the codezzz! ??

I second that !!!! ??

Im looking forward to the progress on this one too

I don’t know if this will be helpful or not, but I’ll toss it out there.

I needed to build an archive for digital images. The catalog had a hair under 5000 images organized into 300+ collections. Seeing that the csv importer wouldn’t handle images, I opted to go with the built-in WordPress importer.

To get it to work, I reverse engineered an export and then wrote a little program that generated the xml necessary for the import. It handles posts, images, featured images, and tags (and the images are associated with the post via the post_parent field). My program also sorted out my photos into a folder structure that corresponds to my WordPress upload configuration. In the end, I uploaded my images (yes, that took a while), ran the import, and ultimately had my website completely populated.

So, it is possible to automate a batch population of a WordPress site. I wrote my program in Delphi (the only language I’m fluent in), and I was able to take advantage of a uniform image naming convention that made it easy to keep things organized. I don’t know how well my little program will work for others, but I think the idea is fairly simple. If you have the ability to create your csv file, it might not take you much more work to create the appropriate xml file.

You can see the end result here

Featured images need to be in the WordPress database (as far as I’ve been able to test), there’s no way to reference another URL for those.

I’m just interested in getting the featured image linked up. I can upload them through the WP media importer (now that v3.3 has the drag and drop capability) and then modify my excel file to use the full path (/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/filename1.jpg)

I’d have to adjust that full path each month for uploads but that’s fairly easy in excel (built a table with variables that I change and the other table will produce the full path)

When will the featured image support be publicly available (or can you send me a version of it to use now?)