While ChannelAdvisor offers an image hosting solution, you may occasionally want to host images locally on your own servers. ChannelAdvisor gives you the ability to include these local image URLs in your image library and associate them with your inventory. 

You can associate these images with inventory either individually or in bulk.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with the following topics before continuing:

• Adding Images to Product Descriptions

Overview

To use images from your own server, they must be accessible from the web and you must know the full URL path to each image (e.g. http://www.mycompany.com/images/SKU_image1.gif).  Images can be associated individually or in bulk.

Associating Externally-Hosted Images Individually

To associate a local image with inventory individually, simply insert the image's URL on the Edit Inventory Item page. If you use this method, the image URL will appear in your image library but without a thumbnail.

Complete the following steps related to this task:

1. Select Inventory > Products > All Products
2. Choose the SKU to be edited.
3. At the bottom of the edit SKU page, under the Select Images heading, type or paste the image URL for the appropriate placement tag.

Associating Externally-Hosted Images In Bulk

To associate locally hosted images in bulk, enter the image URLs in the 'Picture URLs' column in the inventory spreadsheet. For your local images, this process differs slightly from associating images to products because you must enter the entire URL instead of only a file name.

For example in the Picture URLs column, enter the following line:

With this method, ChannelAdvisor will also create thumbnails in your image library for these images. We recommend that you use this method if you choose to host images locally.