Adding a large number of stock photos

Adding a large number of stock photos - Part 6
By Harry Kaplanian
April 10, 2004

In order to batch process the loading of stock photo information into PayLoadz, download this Excel file.

Once you load the file into Excel, you will notice that it has five columns: FilePath, Username, ItemName, ItemId and ItemPrice. Fill this spreadsheet and e-mail it to PayLoadz tech-support requesting (nicely) that they load this information into your account.
They are defined as follows:
FilePath = the absolute path to your stock photo files that will be downloaded by the user including the file name. Note that this is case sensitive! Case must match exactly!
Username = your PayLoadz username. This should be your e-mail address.
ItemName = the name of the item as it will appear on the download email messeage from PayLoadz sent to the customer.
ItemId = the Id number or catalog number of the item. It must be unique!
ItemPrice = the price to be charged for the item.

You probably have thousands of stock photographs and may now be wondering about the difficulty of typing all those filenames and paths accurately. Well, there is an easier way.
1. Setup your stock photographs on your computer in a directory structure that matches what you will setup on your web site. This can’t be exact because you have no drive letters on your web server (unless it is being hosted on Windows).
2. Start the Command Prompt from (in Windows xp) the menu “Start/All Programs/Accessories/Command Prompt”.
3. Change to the topmost directory of where only stock photos and directories of stock photographs are located. Some may refer to this as the “root” of your stock photo collection. In case you have forgotten, the command to change directories in DOS is “cd”. So, for instance, you need to change to the directory called “stock photos”. Simply enter “cd \stock photos”. If it is placed in something deeper then the top level, you may need something like “cd \photography\stock photos”. Finally, be sure that if you have multiple drives that you are on the correct drive.
4. Enter the command “dir /b /s /a-s > names.txt” and press the “Enter” key. When this completes, you will have a text file called “names.txt” that contains a listing of all your stock photo file names and their paths that you can import into Excel.
5. Import the file into Excel.
6. Use Excel’s find and replace feature to change the “c:” in all your paths to whatever you need to match what will be on your web site.
7. Fill in the rest of the spread sheet and save.
8. E-mail the spread sheet to PayLoadz tech-support at support@payloadz.com. Please be polite! They will e-mail you back when they have completed loading the data. This may take a do or so.

You are now ready to start selling!

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