Copy the product photos onto your own server, with the supplier's permission, at the sizes your shop displays. Linking to images on someone else's site lets them break, slow or switch off your catalogue.

The site

A scrapbooking store in a strip mall sells papers, stickers, stamps, die cuts and albums, about three thousand products from three distributors. It also sells online, mostly to customers in smaller towns.

The online shop looks tidy. Each product has a page with a photo, a price and a short description, filled in from the distributors' product lists.

The photos, though, are not on the shop's server. Each one loads from a distributor's own website, by an address that starts with the distributor's domain.

One Monday morning, half the product pages showed empty boxes. Over the weekend, the largest distributor had launched a new website and renamed its image files.

The inference a visitor makes

A visitor does not see a technical problem. They see a shop where pictures are missing, and they draw the usual conclusions.

Nobody is minding it. It may have closed. It may not be a real shop at all, which is not a thought anyone wants in their head before typing a card number.

In scrapbooking the picture is most of the product description. A sheet of patterned paper sold without its pattern is a price and a name, and nobody buys that.

What the shop now depends on

The first is the one that broke this shop. Redesigns rename files as a matter of course, so it will break again with every redesign.

None of the six is under the shop's control, and the supplier has no reason to warn anyone before changing them.

Someone else decides when it breaks

A supplier's website is built for the supplier. When it is redesigned, moved or tidied up, image addresses change, and nobody there thinks about the shops that were borrowing them.

There is no error message for the shop owner. The pages still load, the prices still show, and the gaps appear only to visitors.

This shop found out from a customer's email that afternoon. Every visitor before then had seen the empty boxes.

The supplier can refuse them

Every image another site loads from a supplier's server costs the supplier bandwidth. Many servers have a setting, often called hotlink protection, that refuses images to pages on other domains.

When a supplier turns it on, the shop's photos vanish at once, or are replaced with whatever image the supplier chooses to show instead.

Permission to use a supplier's photos, which many suppliers give their dealers, is not the same as permission to load them from the supplier's server.

A worked example

The owner's first thought was to wait for the distributor to fix it. The distributor had nothing to fix: its own site worked perfectly.

The cause was in the shop's import settings. When the product lists were first loaded, the import stored each photo's web address rather than copying the file, which was quicker and saved space.

The shop's developer matched each product to its new photo by product code, downloaded every image into the shop's own image folder and changed the import to copy files from then on.

Each photo was resized to the two sizes the shop actually displays, renamed after the product and given alternative text from the product name and colour.

The distributor confirmed that dealers may use the photos and pointed the owner to a download area for new releases. A weekly check now lists any product page whose image fails to load.

Every photo is a trip to another server

Loading an image from another domain means the visitor's browser has to look up that domain and open a new connection before the first picture arrives.

The shop's speed then depends on the supplier's server, which may be slow, overloaded or on the other side of the continent.

And supplier images are often the full-size originals made for printed catalogues, several times larger than the shop shows. Phones download all of it and shrink it on screen.

A warning on the secure pages

This shop's account and checkout pages run on HTTPS. The product thumbnails in the cart, loaded from the supplier, come over plain HTTP.

Browsers treat that as mixed content: a secure page carrying insecure pieces. Depending on the browser, the padlock gains a warning or disappears, at the moment customers decide whether to trust the shop.

A shop that moves every page to HTTPS, as Google has encouraged since last summer, turns every borrowed image on every page into mixed content.

Image search sees a copy

When dozens of shops use the same supplier photo, Google Images has dozens of identical copies to choose from, and nothing makes yours the one it shows.

The descriptions copied from the supplier's product lists share the weakness, since every other dealer has them too.

Photos a shop takes itself, of products on its own counter or in its own finished albums, are the only ones nobody else has.

The counter-case within the site

Some suppliers run image services built for dealers, with addresses they promise to keep stable. Those are safer than borrowing from a public website, though the shop still depends on them.

A shop with a small catalogue that takes its own photos anyway meets this problem only with the odd new arrival.

For everything else, the rule is to copy the photos onto your own server, with permission, at the sizes you display.

What to change

  1. Search the shop for the supplier's domain name.
  2. Confirm the dealer terms allow using the photos.
  3. Download every image to your own server.
  4. Change the import to copy files, not addresses.
  5. Resize photos to the sizes the shop shows.
  6. Name files and add alternative text from the product.
  7. Check weekly for images that fail to load.

Step four is the change that prevents a repeat. Copying the current photos fixes today, but an import that still stores addresses will bring the problem back with the next product list.

Another site that depends on someone else's server is taken apart in a realtor site shown inside a frame.

Frequently asked questions

Why did the product photos disappear?

The shop loaded them from the distributor's website. When the distributor launched a new site and renamed its image files, every borrowed address stopped working overnight.

What does a visitor assume from missing photos?

That nobody is minding the shop, that it may have closed or may not be genuine. None of those ends in someone typing a card number.

Can a supplier block my shop's images?

Yes. Many servers can refuse images to pages on other domains, often called hotlink protection, to save bandwidth. Turned on, it empties a borrowing shop at once.

Do borrowed images slow the shop down?

Usually. Each needs a connection to another server, the shop inherits that server's speed, and supplier photos are often full-size originals far larger than the page shows.

Am I allowed to copy the supplier's photos?

Check your dealer agreement. Many suppliers want dealers to use their photos and offer download areas for them, but permission should be confirmed rather than assumed.

How do I stop it happening again?

Change the product import so it copies image files to your own server instead of storing their web addresses, and run a weekly check for images that fail.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Product photos loading from a supplier?

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