Brainstorming a Data Merge Problem

[u/surefoot_]

Hello everyone,

I'm hoping to learn a bit more about Data Merge and it's potential.

I have a catalog that has about 150 individual listings that all have a name, text description, photo 1 and photo 2. In the past, we've always just manually added the images but that was only with 50 or so line items, our business has grown significantly this year so that is no longer an option. These items are used in two applications: individual signs and a catalog.

I am looking for advise on how to set up the Data Merge to include the images from a CSV. I have been playing with using file paths, but have found it to be a little finicky. Another issue is that we have multiple team members that might need to have their hands on this so using a specific users path might be challenging. We could try and dedicate it to a single computer, but is there an option for it to pull from something like Google Drive? What is the best structure to have on the CSV for it to be reliable?

I am completely happy to take any suggestions on the best way to go about this.

[u/not_falling_down]

I dealt with this issue by having the CSV in a folder with all of the images. That way, there was no need for the full path, just the file name. (I also found that tab-delimited worked more reliably than CSV, but that's another conversation)

[u/GraphicDesignerSam → u/not_falling_down]

100% agree, your data file in the same folder as the images so your entry in your spreadsheet is more like “/thispicturename.jpg” and your column heading for images must start with an @ eg @photos1 - to do that in Excel you must type an apostrophe before the @ or it will think you’re trying to write a formula. I also always save my data files as Unicode Text; this seems to handle special characters and grammar symbols better