In Retail POS, you can upload images to products individually. To upload images in bulk, you'll need to use the Retail Imports team. Before submitting your file to the Retail Imports team, you must ensure the file is properly formatted and all images are properly linked.
Formatting your image upload file
You can either download the template and enter product information, or you can download and modify a copy of your inventory file.
To download and prepare your inventory file:
- Navigate to Catalog > Products.
- (Optional) Filter your list to include only the products you want to update.
- Click Export list.
- Select your file format. Your file will automatically download.
- Open the file in Google Sheets or Excel.
- In the spreadsheet, delete any rows of products you don't need to update.
- Delete all columns except for id, handle, sku, and name.
- Rename id to
product_id
. - Add a new column and name it
image_url
.
Values in the product_id, sku, and handle columns must be an exact match to the values in Retail POS. If you modify these fields, your images may import incorrectly or not at all.
Preparing image URLs
Lightspeed does not store your images, it only generates a link to them. You'll need to use an external image hosting service and provide the direct URLs to your images. These URLs must link directly to an image, not a folder or wider website.
- Format your images to .JPEG, .JPG, , or .WEBP file type, at a maximum of 10 MB in size.
- Upload images to an external image hosting service like Dropbox (Google Drive is not recommended due to limited fetch requests).
- In Dropbox or similar, copy the direct URLs to the images and paste them in the image_url column in your spreadsheet.
Getting direct image URLs varies by image hosting service, but generally you can click on the image > Share > update the view permissions if needed > Copy link. Test the link in an Incognito window to verify it directly links to the image.
- If you're importing more than one image per product, create a new row in your spreadsheet, then copy the product_id, handle, sku, and name values into the new row and add the additional image URL. You can import up to 10 images per product.
The import order of images may vary from the order in your spreadsheet. If you need images in a specific order, clearly specify the details in your import request.
- If you're using Dropbox, find and replace any instances of
dl=0
withraw=1
in your image links.
The product_id values will be used to match with products in Retail POS. If no match is found, sku and handle will be used instead. Do not modify these values or images may import incorrectly or not at all.
Variant image upload is not supported by the Retail Imports team. Images can only be uploaded to the parent variant of a product. You can reassign to a variant on the Edit Product page after the import is complete.
Finalizing your import file
- Verify your file before submitting to avoid issues that may cause the data import to fail.
- Remove special characters, like™,☺,©, etc.
- Erase cells with N/A so the field is blank.
- Format scientific numbers (4.001E+11) as regular integers (40010000000).
- Format all cells, including cells with numbers, as plain text. In Google Sheets, click Format > Number > Plain text.
- Save your file as .XLSX (preferred) or .CSV.
- Submit your file to the Retail Imports Team.
What's next?
Adding standard, variant, and composite products
Add different types of products to your inventory.
Learn moreAttachments
- Image Import.csv36 Bytes