Shopp Image Tools

Very often, especially when Shopp is being used in a shared hosting environment, this allows for far faster delivery of images and reduces the burden on server resources considerably.

Set up a directory to store your disk based images, something like wp-content/uploads/shopp is fine. You will need to adjust the Shopp System settings to reflect this ... if in doubt, seek advice from the Shopp documentation. As soon as you're done, get back to Shopp Image Tools and run the conversion tool. No need to worry - if you haven't set something up properly, it will very likely tell you the problem! As always, you should back-up before making any major adjustments to your system and remember: a back-up is useless if you do not know how to restore it.

Traditionally (and even now, if you elect to store product images in the database) all image requests flowed through the Shopp Image Server. Though that is pretty much as fast and streamlined as it can be, it still incurs additional overhead. Previous versions of this plugin introduced Direct Image Mode which allowed your web server (ie, Apache) to serve images directly - without any further overhead. I'm pleased to say this functionality is now baked into Shopp itself and so Direct Image Mode has been removed from all Shopp 1.3-oriented versions of this plugin.

Once images have successfully been migrated to the file system the old copy, by default, remains in the database. This is intentional as the plugin aims to be as non-destructive as possible. However, some people may wish to remove unused copies of images from the database completely for performance reasons or simply as a matter of good housekeeping. Version 1.1 introduces a toolset to do just this. You can instruct the Conversion Tool to clean up after successfully migrating images and if you forget to do this you can also use the Orphan Cleanup Tool to locate disused images within the database and purge them. I strongly recommend that you back-up before using these tools.