watched folder turns phone photos into product images

ivanvallejo

I had 140 products to shoot for the coffee roaster and no budget for a photographer, so I did it with a phone and a script.

Photos just drop into a watched folder and the script takes them from there. Background out, crop to square, three WebP sizes.

The filename carries the SKU so I just name the shot 1042-3.jpg and the script knows which product it goes on. Then it uploads and attaches them.

Before this it was about twenty minutes a product, me clicking around in the media library. Now roughly two and most of that's the shooting.

The background removal surprised me. I wouldn't have trusted it on product shots before. Now I just let it run.

The sizes I just hardcoded. Your theme would probably want other ones.

davidmitchell

Yes, for products that are quite reflective (glass) or transparent/polished metal, what does it do?

ivanvallejo

With glass and chrome I've found that it doesn't work and still end up doing 11 of the products manually. The thing I can't work around is the image with the holes, it's still a transparent pixel count checker in the script prior to the upload that's bugging it.

Golden_Thistle

I don't know what theme you'll end up switching to at some point. So my advice is not to move the original image into your media library.

You can just keep this untouched in a folder so the sizes can be regenerated when it's needed next time.

anita.rath

ivanvallejo wrote
The sizes I just hardcoded.

This does the exact same without programming. There's a paid bulk imag cutter, and another plug-in to load the images bulk. Together they are cheaper than the time spent coding this.

ivanvallejo

It took me a whole weekend. Only does it make sense above like 50 new products a month which is why I've never gotten around to automating my eleven hand shot ones.

Ok, let's take a look at what mine actually does, then you can see what's worth tweaking.

It's the one script and it does the lot in one shot. Photo gets shot on a phone and dropped into the watched folder.

And the script takes it from there; background out, crop to square, three WebP sizes. The filename carries the SKU. So I name the shot 1042-3.jpg and it knows which product it goes on. Then it uploads and attaches them.

As I said though, for what you're looking to do this shouldn't be an issue. With the hand shot ones and a couple other issues I've got here it's not worth the time spent.

Dusty_Falcon

There is one thing in mine worth a tweak though.

When it uploads the photo, it just doesn't set an alt text. The screenshot confirms this:

And I know I'm using that photo for a product gallery where an alt text is really useful.

So that is one gap that could be fixed without too much tweaking.

ivanvallejo

I've been busy and i just made that tweak.

And it appears to be working: it's now pulling the alt text from the product title with a little bit of tweaking to include the color attribute as well.

And it's cutting the image size per page from around 9MB with the original images to under half a megabyte with the WebP sizes.