How Valigara stores product images and videos?

• Product Images
• Videos
• Storage calculation

Product Images

When product image is upload to the system, Valigara stores several copies of the image. This happens because different images are required for different use cases: gallery images, thumbnails, category images etc. For some cases, image is resized on the fly, for other, the optimized image is stored ready. Some web systems store more than 50 variations of the same image.

What images does Valigara store?

• Original images
• Main images
• Watermark images
• Thumbnail images
• Gemstone Certificates/Images

Original images are images that client uploads to Valigara.

Main images are optimized images Valigara uses on posting to channels, creating templates etc.

Original images can be huge and not match to the everyday use (let's say you've uploaded a 5MB image). During the upload, Valigara resizes the image (according to the Image settings) and optimizes it for the web (according to Google recommendations) according to the Image settings . This becomes the Main image. 

Valigara keeps the Original images, for the case some marketplace rises requirements towards images. In this case, the Main image (smaller one) might become obsolete, and Valigara uses the Original image to re-create the Main image according to the new requirements.

Watermark images are created when the watermark is applied in Valigara to the image. 

If the watermark is applied on multiple channels, each of such images will be calculated in the image storage. 

Once Watermark is removed from the image by the user in the Valigara interface, related Watermark image is deleted.

Thumbnail images are small images are created automatically on image upload (according to the Image settings size parameters). This image is used in templates, image galleries, system pages preview etc. 

Gemstone Certificates/Images are images uploaded into the Gemstone fields "Certificate image 1,2".  When uploaded, Valigara creates the PDF file from the image. If the Certificate image is uploaded in the PDF format, the JPG version is created.  

Videos

On a product video upload, Valigara automatically creates copies of the video in all main web formats. This assures a proper display of the video on all major web browsers and mobile devices. 

Recommended video formats: "mp4", "ogg", "webm"
Additional supported video formats: "avi", "mov", "wmv"
Max allowed video size : 50MB

External URLs

If you have an external videos storage, Videos can be added to products as External URLs. In this case, Valigara only keeps the link to the external playable video, without copying and processing it on the Valigara server. The external video URL is accessible in the description / channel templates. Such videos do not take space in the Valigara storage.

It is possible to combine the Valigara-stored videos and External URLs in the same product. 

Storage calculation

The exact calculation of storage used by images appears at the bottom of the Product Images page. The table displays the count of images and the taken storage.

Valigara keeps the images of products which were deleted from the catalog. This way, if the order of the deleted product arrives from the sales channel, Valigara can still display the product in the Orders page.