Short descriptions for Best Sellers

[Hettie]

Hi,

I have found the thread on short descriptions for best sellers & also bought items, have printed it and am off to have a play. But on reading further on down the posts on the same subject, thumbnails were mentioned quite a bit.

Please don't tell me that I have to create thumbnails for every single product on the site? Oh I could cry!

What size does anyone recommend? If you don't put a thumbnail in does the 'no photo' photo come up or does the larger product photo come up?

Thanks,

Hettie.

[Duncan Rounding]

Creating thumbnails is not difficult or too time consuming. You can do it in a batch. Try for example FastStone Photo Resizer from Faststone.org:
http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDownload.htm

[leehack]

And if that is too much trouble and time, let the browser resize the main images and see how it looks.

[Hettie]

Thumbnails

Thankyou.

I have Photoshop, so can re-size but it's a time element. I should have done them at the same time I was doing the main product photo.

The main product photos on the site are 200px high. What size are thumbnails generally, 100 or 150 say?

Thanks for your help.

Bw,

Hettie.

[leehack]

75px usually.

[Hettie]

Am I missing something

I have followed the post for brief description for the best seller list to a T and it's worked brilliantly (actually there is no description at all, but it's so much better than the epic novel it was showing that I'm not complaining!)

But I have no thumbnails on the site at all, but the clever little best seller list is re-sizing the product photos, which are 200px high to about 75px without me asking. Will it publish exactly the same as in preview mode? Will I never have to add thumbnails if it is doing it itself?

Overwhelmed!

Hettie.

[leehack]

But I have no thumbnails on the site at all, but the clever little best seller list is re-sizing the product photos, which are 200px high to about 75px without me asking. Will it publish exactly the same as in preview mode? Will I never have to add thumbnails if it is doing it itself?

That'll be the browser resizing i mentioned.

Upload it in test mode and take a look, it should look identical. Its pointless asking whether it will look the same, cos if we say yes and when you upload it doesn't, you've not achieved anything. Use test mode to view, that's what its for. Much better to see for yourself when possible, than take somebody's word for it.

[pinbrook]

I allow the code to resize the thumbnail, see surf-wax.co.uk/acatalog/ted-shred-air-freshener.html

the also boughts underthe products, all images are the original product image simple with width=75 tagged on to it.

<img src="<actinic:variable name="ProductImageFileName" />" width="75" alt="<actinic:variable name="ProductName" />" />

[NormanRouxel]

If you are using New Product and Best Sellers on the home page and in the sidebars, then these layouts use the normal product image (re-sized by the browser).

If you want to display images in the Cart or search results, then you will need to define a thumbnail image.


1) You could use Access to tweak the database and set thumbnail images that are the same as the normal product image for all products. Open ActinicCatalog.mdb in Access (back it up first) and look in the Product table. Now create an update query that will copy all entries in the Image FileName field to the sThumbnailImage field.

This will give you full sized images for your thumbnail and the browser will scale them down.

2) You could go a bit further and batch resize all your images and give them a prefix at the same time. E.g. image123.jpg becomes t_image123.jpg. I use IrfanView ( www.irfanview.net ) for such tasks.

Then do a similar update query as above but this time tweak the query to copy all non null entries in the Image FileName field to the sThumbnailImage field, adding the t_ prefix as you go. If these images are in a sub-folder you'll need to be careful that your query adds the prefix into the correct place.

[Hettie]

Thanks for all your help. It loaded perfectly.

Bw,

Hettie.