AmeriCommerce online stores support three different methods for handling and sourcing product photos. This is set at the system level and applies for all product photos.
Resizer: AmeriCommerces' built in photo handling feature. This allows dynamic resizing of any picture on the storefront.
Direct Reference: Uses the entered reference (relative or absolute URL path). Does not modify the image.
External Imaging: Allows photos from imaging servers, such as Scene7 or Amazon S3. Can specify a custom image path and picture popup.
Photo Base Reference: Only use this field when using External Imaging. This is so you can set the path that your photos will pull from. Allows you to enter a path with 3 parameters.
- ##PICNAME## - Picture reference.
- ##WIDTH## - Width specified for a particular image or set of pages.
- ##HEIGHT## - Height specified for a particular image or set of pages.
Thumb Base Reference: Same functionality as Photo Base Reference. The difference here is that you will want to put the path that links to your thumbnails.
Photo Popup Base Reference: Same functionality as Photo Base Reference. However, this field needs to be linked to images that will appear in pop up situations (most likely a larger image size).
Product Photo Handling
Configure these settings by navigating to Settings > Catalog > General through the Admin Console. It will be under the System Settings section.
Use the Resizer option when hosting the images on the same server as the website. The other options do not need to be set.
If you host your images elsewhere, then you will can set these to Direct Reference. Note that you will have to input your images as Absolute URLs. The other options do not need to be set.
Otherwise, if your hosting your images with a cloud server, you can use External Imaging. To use this, you will need to populate the other fields associated with the account.
For these photo reference fields, you will need to input the URL where the images pull from. These URL's will differ from service to service. You can take a look at the image above for an example of how to use this feature with Scene7.
While it's not very intuitive, as a workaround to link images in the admin page while in external imaging mode you can use "Insert From -> Direct Path" and type the rest of the path to your image assuming that it will be used in the external imaging url you have set up.
For example, if you want to use an image called "test.jpg" and your external imaging url is set to http://img.someimageserver.com/##PICNAME## (meaning if you go to http://img.someimageserver.com/test.jpg your image should appear).
You should be able to use "Insert From -> Direct Path" and type "test.jpg" in the resulting box to link the image.