BookTrakker Image Manager Help

Image Manager automates the upload of up to five images per record to an external hosting service that can provide URL links pointing to the images that can then be included in uploads to the services, or a single image per record to ABE or Chrislands. All you have to to is Scan the image, BookTrakker does all the rest.

Setting up your Image Hosting Service

Click the Online button at the top to get to this screen:

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Click the Images button to bring up

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Click Yes to set up your Image Hosting Service.  This will either be ABE or Chrislands if you do not have an Image Hosting Service, or it will be the FTP URL of your Image Hosting Site.  We will be offering an Image Hosting Service soon for an additional fee should you not have either of these options available to you.

Either fill out the fields with the information regarding your Image Hosting Service or click one of the buttons labeled Chrislands or ABE Books to copy the Service Data from your Online Services list if you plan to host your images on either of those sites.

Chrislands – Click this to pull the information from your Chrislands Service Entry.  This applies only if you plan to host your image files directly on Chrislands.  You can also host your images on a Hosting Site and provide a URL to Chrislands for display of the image on your Chrislands Website.

ABE Books - Click this to pull the information from your ABE Books Service Entry.  This applies only if you plan to host your image files directly on ABE Books.  You can also host your images on a Hosting Site and provide a URL to ABE Books for display of the image through your ABE Books Account.

You may need to determine what the proper Image Folder Path is for your Image Hosting Site if you do not already know what it is.  This can vary from site to site and should be available in the documentation for the Hosting Site.

Once you have completed the Setup, press the Test button to test the settings.  If you see a Host Found, Test Passed message then you know you are all set, if not, something is not correct.

When you are satisfied that the entries are correct, click the Finish button to close the form and trigger a refresh of data from the Image Hosting site if you are not using Chrislands or ABE Books.

Progress Windows

 

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Image Manager needs to coordinate files from your local drive with those online and this takes time.  We present these Progress Windows to provide feedback on these operations.  As you accumulate more images, it will take longer to process these lists.

Image Manager Dashboard

 

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Dashboard Overview

The Records list displays the records that are filtered by the Records to show dropdown box.  It will select records from the BookTrakker Inventory Database and coordinate them with the Local and Online Image files which are displayed in the other lists.  Any existing local image files that match the SKU of the book selected on the Left will appear in the Local Image Files list, as will any files that are found on the Image Hosting Service unless you host your images on Chrislands or ABE, neither of which allow retrieval of the File List from their server.

Remove Sold Image – This button will remove the file selected in the Online image files list that is associated with the SKU selected in the Records list.

Remove Sold Images – This button will remove all the Online Images associated with the SKU selected in the Records list on the Left.

Remove All Images – This button will clear All Images from the Image Hosting Service – again assuming you do not host images directly on Chrislands or ABE Books.

Here is an example of what the Image Manager Dashboard looks like after being configured for a site that has existing files:

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Daily Operation

Once configured as described above, BookTrakker will automatically upload new images scanned for Available books while removing images for any Sold books in the Upload.  All you do is what you did before, scan in book images and press the Process and Upload button to upload your Records.

BookTrakker Image Manager can upload multiple images to an Image Hosting Service as long as you are not using Chrislands or ABE to host the actual files. Up to 5 images total can be included in the Listing Upload File; the limit for Amazon and  ABE allows for 5 images, other services less.  As previously mentioned, it can also upload one image to either a Chrislands website or ABE. (ABE does not provide image hosting, Chrislands does)

If you use a third party Image Hosting Service then BookTrakker will upload images to that service, and then construct the Image URL’s for inclusion in the Listing File for Amazon, ABE and elsewhere.  The URL is based on the Image URL Prefix in Tools > Options > Online in BookTrakker. 

A Prefix looks like this:  http://www.hostingsite.com/folder/ 

When you create an image using BookTrakker’s image system the complete URL shows up in the ImgURL field at the bottom of the Optional tab. 

For example: http://www.hostingsite.com/folder/1234.jpg  where ‘hostingsite.com’ is the Host Address for your Hosting Site and ‘folder’ is the folder the images are stored in if there are any subfolders (this is not always required, so check with your Site to be sure).

If you create your own images outside of BookTrakker then add them to the BTPro\Data\Images folder then the Image Manager can upload the images and create the necessary URL’s pointing to them when uploads are processed.