Reply To: Web Site Performance |

Here’s my interpretation of the problem.

eCommerce generates several thumbnails when a product is uploaded. You specify a primary thumbnail – say a-thumbnail.jpg. According to how you have set up your site, eCommerce knows that it will need thumbnails of sizes (for example) of 31px X 31px, 38px X 38px, 148px X 148px, and so on. The site could generate these dynamically when the thumbnail is called up, and this is the fallback position. However, to avoid this, eCommerce generates thumbnails as part of the upload process. It names these a-thumbnail-31×31.jpg, a-thumbnail-38×38.jpg, a-thumbnail-148×148.jpg – you see the pattern. I think these are recorded in the database, but I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that even if these files exist, eCommerce doesn’t always use them. One circumstance is when using images that come from a Nikon camera. Some better Nikons names image files as X – for example, 311X2000.jpg. I think that eCommerce is interpreting the file basename as an image size and thus screwing up. I put a kludge into eCommerce in the code that works all this out so that there is a final check on whether an appropriate thumbnail file exists, and if it does my patch forces the code to use it. It works for my site but I didn’t generalize the file location part, it was getting too hard to be worth it. Doing this precludes ever upgrading eCommerce again unless eCommerce fixes it of course – it’s a rotten way to do things but it’s all that left to me.

I might be wrong in my reading here. Does anyone else have a better idea?

I don’t know how to put a ticket into ecommerce development – who owns that thing anyway?