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FiberGuy · 02-26-2007, 11:32 PM,

Situation:
I want to import items and their photos from our web store to our x-cart shop using a spread sheet.
Yes, we still have the original photos, but they are scattered amongst 100's of folders on two computers, not to mention the fact that 1000's more of these photos are of sold items that are no longer needed.

Problem:
1000's of images hosted at our web store.
I do have access to the file names via spread sheet.
They are located in a restricted directory at the bcentral servers... I have no FTP access or download capability. I was on the phone with two bCentral reps asking how to do it and they both insist that "I CAN'T".

Ideal Situation:
I would go to bCentral's image servers where the photos are stored, dump them to my local machine and upload to our x-cart image folder...

... but apparently I can't do that.

Any suggestions short of finding and uploading the photos one by one? ((((((JOY!)))))

Cheers

(I'm off for the day now, so I'll check back in tomorrow...)

***regic*** · 02-27-2007, 12:00 AM,

Quote:I have no FTP access or download capability

The only solution would be to right click the images in your store and save them individually. :blinkie:

BellisimaJ. · 02-27-2007, 01:20 AM,

[quote author=regic link=topic=8058.msg45200#msg45200 date=1172534447]

Quote:I have no FTP access or download capability

The only solution would be to right click the images in your store and save them individually. :blinkie:
[/quote]

:blinkie: :blinkie: :blinkie:

WebGraphicsSource · 02-27-2007, 04:05 AM,

they should have access to the server right? ask them if they can zip the folder that contains the images, and then send them thru e-mail or give you a link to download them.

FiberGuy · 02-27-2007, 03:05 PM,

[quote author=WebGraphicsSource link=topic=8058.msg45224#msg45224 date=1172549108]
they should have access to the server right? ask them if they can zip the folder that contains the images, and then send them thru e-mail or give you a link to download them.

[/quote]

Gosh... I'd certainly think so. Thanks for the tip... I'll be calling again and ask them specifically what you suggested. I think with so many photos, emailing my be out of the question. We're talking about over 15,000 images, most of which are already compressed jpg's, so zipping them wouldn't necessarily bring the total file size down that much. But I will ask both... it would save a tremendous amount of time.

I think part of the problem is that I believe there is only a couple of tech's there now. There used to be a dozen or so, not including the "upper level" that handled the REAL problems. BCentral is supposedly NO MORE after June 31, so I'm sure that has something to do with it.

My only other idea was what Regic mentioned, which I obviously wasn't excited about. I played that game already, back when we closed our ebay store. Back then it was only about 1800 items (two stores), but now it's more like 4500 with an average of 4-5 photos of each.

ICK!

bargainbloodhound · 02-27-2007, 05:42 PM,

Quote: so zipping them wouldn't necessarily bring the total file size down that much.

If the file is large you could always use Wget to retrieve the zip file from B-central (if you have access to SSH on your new server).

FiberGuy · 02-27-2007, 05:49 PM,

[quote author=bargainbloodhound link=topic=8058.msg45277#msg45277 date=1172598145]

Quote: so zipping them wouldn't necessarily bring the total file size down that much.

If the file is large you could always use Wget to retrieve the zip file from B-central (if you have access to SSH on your new server).
[/quote]

I'm still in my UNIX-learning infancy, and have only used PuTTY since January. Can you elaborate?

bargainbloodhound · 02-27-2007, 06:10 PM,

[quote author=FiberGuy link=topic=8058.msg45278#msg45278 date=1172598569]
[quote author=bargainbloodhound link=topic=8058.msg45277#msg45277 date=1172598145]

Quote: so zipping them wouldn't necessarily bring the total file size down that much.

If the file is large you could always use Wget to retrieve the zip file from B-central (if you have access to SSH on your new server).
[/quote]

I'm still in my UNIX-learning infancy, and have only used PuTTY since January. Can you elaborate?

[/quote]

to use wget to retrieve a file from another server you'd type:

Code:
wget http://www.domain.com/file.zip

If they could put the zip file in a publicly accessible directory you could use wget. The retrieval time is a fraction of the time it would take to download the file to your computer and then upload it to the new server.

FiberGuy · 02-27-2007, 06:17 PM,

Ahhhh...

I'll add that to my request list.

Tanx!

Smile

FiberGuy · 03-04-2007, 06:20 PM,

***UPDATE***

Microsoft was of no help whatsoever. They refused to even *try* to send me up the pike to speak with someone who has server access. I didn't spend to much time prodding them, they (bCentral) are going the way of the dodo as of June 1. (It still amazes me that they are giving e-commerce the cold shoulder, completely doing away with any viable solutions.)

I did, however find a reasonable solution to scraping the images off our site.

I found this software on zdnet called GetRight.

It's a pretty cool download manager that can download everypage from a web site automatically. I'm still learning with it, but have managed to figure out how to go to each category in our store and download only the image files to my local machine. It's free to try, with very few "locked" features... but it didn't take me long to figure out it was worth the pricetag!

I don't like to promote software much, because so much of it is bunk, with many more that may work fine on one machine and be total garbage on another... but this one helped me out so much, I thought I'd give them a plug.

YMMV

Cheers, and thanks to all for the suggestions!