Is it necessary to upload product images into the "media/import" folder before importing products from 1.9.1 to 1.9.4?

Question

Magento 1.9.1 to Magento 1.9.4

I am exporting products from Magento 1.9.1 into Magento 1.9.4 and I read the following here:

Before the import put image files in media/import and in the .csv file enter the image name prepended with a slash. You can use the same image for base, small, thumbnail images and media gallery. For that fill in the appropriate fields:

image, small_image, thumbnail, media_gallery.

https://www.mag-manager.com/useful-articles/tipstricks/required-csv-file-values-for-error-free-magento-import-via-admin/

The spreadsheet I exported already has all those columns. Do I have to download the folder with all the product images (where exactly is that?) from the old store (1.9.1) and put it in the media/import folder or put it directly into the images folder on 1.9.4 (where is that?). Do I have to do this before I IMPORT the csv file or can I do it later?

Answer 1

You can import images at any time simply by using an import csv that has 4 columns

sku, base_image, small_image, thumbnail_image

Images can be pre-uploaded into the import folder if you have FTP access. The import folder is where you put the web ready, pre-magento processed images that you name in the CSV when you want to bulk add images using the importer.

When you run an import, you specify which folder the images are in and therefore Magento goes to that folder to retrieve them and then pushes them out into cached image folders once it's processed them.

If all the images that were used in the 1.9.1 site were added using this method, then you can download the import folder contents and upload them to the 1.9.4 site import folder.

If you upload images in the admin, they get saved in the end up in the processed image folders /media/catalog/product/

The image names you see in the export are within those media/catalog/product/ folders. That means, to re-use them, you'd need to copy all those folders across from the 1.9.1 site to the 1.9.4 site.

If you go that route, you would download media/catalog/product/ and then upload the sub-folders of it, back up to media/catalog/product/ on the 1.9.4 site - make sense?

Magento indexes all images by taking the first and second character of the image name and creating folders named the same.

So, as an example, if the base_image for a SKU on your export is /w/m/wmbb1_1.jpg then you will need to copy

media/catalog/product/w/m/wmbb1_1.jpg

and so on.

In theory, if you copy all of media/catalog/product from 1.9.1 to 1.9.4 the product images will show up but copy the images before you run the import else it'll replace all the images with placeholders because they won't exist on import.

This is the Magento documentation on it for you - https://docs.magento.com/m1/ce/user_guide/store-operations/data-import-product-images.html

Hope that helps.