This may seem wierd, but here goes. Say I have a product uploaded, but not the image. Is here a way for the site to know how to put a certain image, like and image not available image when there is no image uploaded? Does that make any sense??

Try to explain that one more time for me.....

If you are uploading the product information through dataport, just put this tag in if you are version 4.0:

Images/noimage.gif

This will be an image that looks like a CD with a camera in the middle of it. You should be able to leave these columns blank, and no image (or broken link)

If you are still on version 3.1, you would need to put this in for the image:

images/clear.gif

This is a one pixel-by-one pixel clear image. In essence, it is no image at all.

If you are adding the product info through the admin panel, it will put the blank image in automatically.

You can upload your own blank image if you want. To do this, simply upload your own image, just make sure the path is the same.

I think TweetyBird may have been looking for a way that the system would automatically determine if the image was moved/deleted or otherwise unavailable and instead of displaying a broken image it would display a noimage.gif/jpg type file...

I was actually wondering about this as well. We're in the midst of photographing our complete inventory, but probably won't complete the project for another couple months, although we'll be uploading images daily as they become available.

It would be great to be able to specify all of the image names for everything in our database (and upload with DataPort) so that as a customer is browsing the site, they'll see the product images that are currently uploaded, but if the look at a product who's photo isn't uploaded yet they see a "Photo Available Soon" image versus seeing a broken image.

You can upload them quickly with DataPort.

We had only about 50 that were missing images, so we did it by hand rather than mess with trying to figure out DataPort. If you have too many, though, you might want to consider the DataPort option.

What we're actually asking: Is there a way to change the default "broken image" to a more friendly custom image, i.e. "Picture coming soon"...?

Yes, there is, but you have to make the image yourself and upload it. Then assign that image to the products it goes to. Just like any other image.

Makes sense, except that the point of the original question is to have that custom image show up by default when the image file specified for a specific product is not available (i.e. not uploaded). In other words, if I specify the name of a steering wheel I'm selling as wheel.jpg, and specify it as such on my web site, can I have my custom "image not available" image show up in the event that I havne't actually uploaded my wheel.jpg image yet?

If you create a custom image not available and place that on you site then just reference it in you dataport upload

Hopoe this answers it for you.

Hmmm. I guess the actual answer is "maybe".

If you are using Dataport you must upload your custom image just once then reference it for the products that will have no image

Since pics come from my brother (our photographer), I have to typically add those later. So, I upload everything with the following custom image



and update pics as I have them available.

I don't know how can make a browser reference another image, other than the one referenced, in the event it does not find the image. If they can, that is waaaayyy cool and hats off to the guy that came up with it!!!!