The Bulk Uploader Addon allows you, as the site administrator, to upload mass quantities of listings on a category by category basis for each user in your GeoProducts database. All your client needs to do is send you an excel spreadsheet (or .csv document) of their inventory. You then save this document as a .csv file in preparation for the upload.

Once installed, the Bulk Uploader has its own series of admin pages which walk you through the upload process in an easy to follow, step-by-step format. If you make a mistake with the upload, or simply need to cancel and reupload a new spreadsheet every couple of days, no problem. The bulk uploader maintains a history of recent uploads and allows you to simply ‘undo’ an upload. All listings created by that upload are automatically removed from your site.

<tip c n>Note that there is a max upload size configuration within the php.ini php configuration file that may affect very large bulk upload files. You will need to make sure that this configuration in the php.ini file is set large enough to allow the size of bulk upload file you will be using.</tip>

<tip c n>Note that there is a max execution time configuration within the php.ini php configuration file that may affect very large bulk upload files. You will need to make sure that this configuration in the php.ini file is set high enough to allow the size of bulk upload file you will be using.</tip>

• Server Configuration
• Settings

Beginning with Bulk Uploader v2.4.0, it is now possible to bulk upload into multiple categories from a single file. To do so, select the "Multiple Categories" checkbox on Step 1 of the uploader. This will modify Step 2 of the upload process as follows:

• A new column type, Category > Category ID#, will be present. Create a column in your CSV file that holds the numerical category ID numbers for each listing, and assign it to this new column. Numerical category ID numbers may be found in the admin, on the Categories Setup page – look for the number in (parentheses) by each category name.
• When uploading to multiple categories, category-specific questions will not be available, and will not be present as selectable options in Step 2. Site-wide Optional Fields will remain available for all bulk uploads, and category-specific questions will still be available if doing a single-category bulk upload.

The "Checkbox List" is a new feature added in Bulk Uploader v2.9.0. It will appear as an option during Step 2, in the Category Questions dropdown.

This is a quick way to set multiple "checkboxes" in a listing to true. You will need to know the internal ID number of each checkbox you want to set. This number appears in (parenthesis) after the Name of each question on the Category Questions admin page.

The Checkbox List accepts a comma-separated list of questions that should be marked as on. For example, if you're using the default questions packaged with the Automobiles category, and you want to upload a car that has GPS, OnStar Technology, and Air Conditioning, you could enter "152,153,166" in the Checkbox List field.

When using the "Better Quality" upload method (see below), the uploader accepts image references as either fully-qualified URLs (e.g. http://mysite.com/images/an_image.jpg ) or local server paths (e.g. /var/www/html/user_images/this_image.jpg ). For "Faster"-type uploads, only fully-qualified URLs will work.

The most common approach is to assign each URL or path to a numbered Image URL column, as in "Image URL 1" and "Image URL 2"

There are two "meta-image" options designed to make your life easier:

• "Base Image URL" will be prepended to every numbered slot, so you could use a Base Image URL of http://example.com/images/ and then Image URL 1 of image1.jpg and Image URL 2 of image2.jpg
• Image List accepts a comma-separated list of images, that will be given the lowest-available slots (e.g. "http://example.com/1.jpg,http://example.com/2.jpg")
• These can be combined. For example, you could set Base Image URL to http://example.com/images/ and then set Image List to "1.jpg,2.jpg,3.jpg"

As of Bulk Uploader v2.9.0, the addon will download images from remote URLs to the local server and attempt to resize them and create thumbnails, according to the main Admin settings for doing so. This should make images added by the Bulk Uploader much more consistent with images added via the normal, frontend upload process.

A common problem is attempting to Bulk Upload images that are too large or too numerous for the Bulk Uploader to be able to download them in the time allotted. If you're experiencing difficulties Bulk Uploading large quantities or sizes of images, you may need to adjust your server's PHP settings to allow more processing time, or you may need to adjust the images you're attempting to load to make them smaller.

You can now select between two methods of bulk uploading images, Better Quality and Faster. The Better Quality setting causes images to be downloaded to the local server and have processing performed on them, including resizing them according to the main software's specified dimensions, and creating thumbnails. The Faster setting uses the old method of strictly URL-referencing images and does only minimal validation on them. As such, Faster mode is likely to be useful if you are uploading a lot of images (or some very large images).

The Base Image Path setting performs almost identically to the "Base Image URL" CSV data selection option in step 2, but allows you to enter the value once for all listings in an upload. This may have further usefulness in some Revolving Inventory applications, where the csv source may be available to end-users, but you don't want to reveal internal server-paths. In cases where this setting is used in conjunction with the "Base Image URL" column in step 2, it follows the pattern of "specific-trumps-general." In other words, a Base path given for a specific listing in step 2 will overwrite the value for step 1, but only for that listing.