Bulk uploading images via CMS

[o_rei (Kk)]

What is the easiest and/or cheapest way to bulk upload images via CMS and a CSV file?

The project I am working on will have a number of items in the collection, each one with jpgs, png, glb files attached.

Due to the number of items (700+) I’m looking for the simplest way to go about doing this.

I’ve seen some discussion on this topic before but because they were a little dated I wondered if there is a more recent way to approach it.

[webdev (Jeff Selser)]

@o_rei - Welcome to the forum. Here a some guidelines for you to follow;

• Image field — images should be added as direct URLs (links that end in an image file extension) in your CSV. Only supported image file types will be imported into your Collection.
• Multi-image field — like single images, groups of images should be added as distinct, direct URLs (links that end in an image file extension) in your CSV. Only supported image file types will be imported into your Collection. Each group of image URLs in a cell should be separated by semicolons. (e.g., “https://images.unsplash.com/bird1.jpeg; https://images.unsplash.com/bird2.jpeg; https://images.unsplash.com/bird3.jpeg”)‍

Learn more at: Import collection items | Webflow University

[o_rei (Kk)]

Thanks for the reply.

What’s the best way to automate generating the direct URLs that I then add into my CSV?

[shawncarrie (Shawn Carrié)]

1. Prepare your files
   Give them a regular naming structure that you can keep track of them, and put them all into a single directory so that you can work with them.

2. Upload to a server
   You can use an Amazon S3 bucket, Dropbox, or even GitHub to upload your files. As long as you get full, predictable URL paths that you can append the file name to, you’re good.

3. Prepare for CSV import
   Concatenate the server directory path with your file names and add them to your CSV for import. Use the command line to list out the filenames.

[evolross (Ross N)]

Still a bit confused… after importing the CSV, are the images copied into the Webflow CDN and their URLs updated (same as how they are if you upload them manually when entering a new Collection item) or are they simply linked to where they are stored at the time of import (e.g. Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc.).

[memetican (Michael Wells)]

Those images are imported into Webflow’s hosting, so you only need those live online URLs during the import process itself.

[Jodie_Ball]

I tried these solutions and nothing is working. I have an image URL per blog post in my CSV – all ending with .jpg but when I go to map the fields after uploading, the image field is not selectable.

[memetican (Michael Wells)]

Hi @Jodie_Ball I can’t guess much without a readonly designer link and a sample of the CSV. I’d double-check that your CSV is formatted correctly, with useful column headers, and also check whether your CMS is an image or a multi-image field.

It could also be that your image field has constraints ( image size, etc. ) which could affect importing- but I wouldn’t expect that to impact the column-to-field mapping stage.