Keep your product catalog up-to-date and cutting edge by showcasing your products with visually appealing high resolution images. To optimally display and highlight all of the product choices customers have when purchasing, you can add multiple images per product as well as captions that describe each photo. These images and captions are easily imported into Handshake via the bulk importer and are visible in both Handshake Mobile and Handshake Direct.

Things to Know Before Uploading:

• All images must either be JPG or PNG files.
• The maximum resolution that Handshake will accept for each image is 1920 x 1920. Anything larger will be scaled down to fit within this resolution.
• Images and their captions can be imported in bulk using a spreadsheet of image URLs, or by uploading a zipped file of images.
• Images can be manually imported from the product detail page.
• Currently, Handshake can only accept uploads of up to 128MB at a time. If your ZIP file exceeds this limit, please separate your images in to multiple ZIP files and upload them one at a time. Make sure to select the "Add new  / update existing" option as opposed to the "Replace all" option. This will ensure that new uploads will not overwrite your previously uploaded data.
• If your products have variants, and as a result have Master SKU's, images must be attached to the Master SKU. When using the bulk import methods mentioned below you must reference the Master SKU. Referencing the individual variant SKU will not work. If you have multiple images to represent the various options available for a product, you will want to map all the corresponding images to the Master SKU of the product(s).

If you visit the bulk import / export page from within your account, you will find the images importer.
 

Clicking on import will open a window where you can download sample files for the various import methods that are covered in this article.

These sample files are formatted specifically for importing information into Handshake and we encourage you to use them as the template for your own file. For your convenience, we've provided them here for you as well:

• image URL spreadsheet template
• ZIP file template for fuzzy file matching
• ZIP file template for manifest importing
• Images using directories template
  
  

Bulk Image Importing Methods

Uploading by image URL

If you host your own images on the web and can access the URLs, we recommend uploading your images via an excel or CSV file. Take a look at the example file below:

Only the sku (referring to the sku of the product in your catalog) and url (referring to the exact web address where your image file is being hosted) columns are required for this import to work. For each row on your spreadsheet, Handshake will copy the image from the URL, store it, and assign it to the specified product sku.

The third column in the file is for text captions. You can use captions to provide a short description that will be displayed with the image in Handshake. For example, if you have multiple images for a product, you may want to specify which angle of the product the photo represents (e.g., Front, Back, Side) or if you have a product available in multiple colors you can provide the exact color name (i.e Royal Blue, Titanium White, Van Dyke Brown). 

To add multiple images for a product, you need to list its SKU as many times as there are images to be attached. Notice how rows 2 and 3 have a repeat SKU 1109072, however the image URL and captions are different.

Fuzzy Filename Matching

If your image files are stored locally on your computer, fuzzy filename matching is one of the simpler methods for importing. Create a ZIP file that contains the images you want to import. To assign an image to a particular product, its filename needs to identically match the SKU of the product. Some examples from the Demo company are shown below:
 

There are some situations in which this method might not be the best option:

• If you want to attach a single image to multiple products, then it would be inefficient to have to make duplicates of the image for each different SKU.
• If your images are not already named by product SKU, it could be a time consuming process to rename them all. 

If the importer cannot find an exact SKU match for an uploaded file, it will then try to attach that file to any product whose SKU contains the filename. For example, in the Demo company there are three men's sweaters with the SKUs M.SW.01, M.SW.02 and M.SW.03. If you upload an image file named M.SW.jpg, it will be attached to all three sweaters, since all of their SKUs contain M.SW.

This method is useful if you have very long SKUs and you don't want to spend time renaming images to match them exactly. It is also a simple way to attach an image to multiple products with similar SKU.

Fuzzy filename matching can also be used to attach multiple images to a single product. Using SKU M.SW.01 from our example above, if you were to import two images with names such as M.SW.01_front.jpg and M.SW.01_back.jpg, both of these files would attach to SKU M.SW.01 based on the fuzzy file matching logic.
 

Multi-Image Folder Directories 

If your image files are stored locally on your computer and you are attaching multiple images to a single product, you can put all the corresponding images into a folder whose name matches the target SKU. In the example below, the three images inside the SAX.A folder will be attached in the product catalog to the product with SKU SAX.A

 

if you need more control over how images are attached to products and do not want to worry about renaming image files, the manifest method is a better approach.

Manifest Uploads

If your image files are stored locally on your computer, but there are too many to realistically rename to match the filename to the corresponding SKU, an XLS/XLSX needs to be included in your ZIP file along with your images, and it should look something like this:
  

 

Be advised that:

1. The XLS/XLSX file must be named "manifest".
2. The spreadsheet must include the following two columns: 
   • filename - referring directly the name of an image file that is included in the imported ZIP.  
   • sku -this is the SKU of the product in Handshake that the image file is being attached to.
3. You can also include a third column, caption, for the purposes of including image captions.
4. To import multiple images for a product, create a row for each image that should be assigned to the product.
5. The images, and the manifest file referencing the images, must all be contained within the same folder that gets converted to a ZIP file (note the screenshot below).
    

Importing via the Product Details Page

From the products page within your account, you can choose a specific product SKU and access its product details page. From there, click where it says 'Upload Image' to access the image importer.



With the 'My Computer' option selected on the left, you can either drag the file directly into the window or click 'Choose File' to browse your computer.

You can select one or multiple images for import.

 

  

 

If you have any additional questions about adding or updating your product images, please email our customer support team.