I have an existing web site with thousands of products. I have several storefronts and all products are available on all stores using the same product images with the same image role settings (i.e. base, small, thumbnail).
I have produced new product images for a subset of the products and want to replace the existing product images in Magento with these new images.
I created an import file with SKU and references to the new images. After running the import, all product images changed to the new versions as expected. The problem though, is that the image roles were not maintained for the storefronts, only for the default view. So, for instance, the image intended as a thumbnail is no longer set as a thumbnail for the storefronts.
To resolve this I tried creating individual import files for each storefront (by including store_view_code
and not only SKU
as above) where I re-import the product images. This was successful and the image role is now set for the storefront. BUT, the import also resets the product URL back to the default URL and thus makes the product unavailable on the old storefront URL. The product URL was not included in the import. If I do include it, it does set it to what is in the import file and not the default but I don't want to have to include the URL in my image import. Changing the URL on storefront imports even though this column is not included must be some core Magento bug.
So, my question is if anyone knows of a way to import images for a multi-store setup which maintains the image roles for all storefronts. Either by making the default import role settings apply to all storefronts or by making a storefront import not change the URL or through some other way.