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If Google Shopping Integration uploads , can images upload to a CDN or Cloud Site?

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    If Google Shopping Integration uploads , can images upload to a CDN or Cloud Site?

    Google Shopping Integration uploads to google has me thinking. Since Miva has built an automatic updater for google shopping in the new version of Merchant...

    Brought to mind an old question that has floated around the forum, "Can we have images hosted elsewhere and still have image machine work?"

    This topic came up in 2013 and again in spring 2015 on the forums. Rick Wilson said he didn't think ImageMachine would work with remotely hosted images.
    But I know that with php, wordpress and other content management systems it is possible and done often. Why not Miva Merchant?

    We also have tested and found that using a CDN often reduces page loading speeds by about 30-40% on our sites (we have multiple images and thumbnails as well as use jquery). So we ideally would have our stores pull images from off site (we'd do a sub domain like images. mysite.com for each of our sites).

    We really want to have a central repository for all our product images as we have multiple online stores. An image management system with CDN like those offered by Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Sites with Rackspace CDN? Really isn't that expensive in terms of hosting and delivery (if you need it).

    Ideally, we could just put the filenames of the images into the miva store admin... and using the domain settings tell the store what domain to use to get the images. (ex: //images.mydomain.com)
    But in the past, image machine wouldn't work if we did that. So with our Miva stores, we are stuck having the images locally stored.

    Now that I see Google Shopping Integration actually notifies google when a product is updated.. I'm thinking..
    How hard would it be to have the Miva store do this for images?

    Ideally, for us, the images would physically be hosted on our cloud site so that the CDN would just work (they are automated afterall).

    But a fall back... keeping a copy of the images locally (so image machine could work on them locally) might work like this..
    1. admin uploads image. store notifies cloud site to pull in new image.
    2. visitor looks at the product page first time, image machine notices missing images (404 errors) and creates them from the local copy (also notifies cloud site to get newly images created).
    3. domain settings in the store point to cdn url (so images will be delivered via cdn instead of from local copies)

    Basically Everytime an image is uploaded or created by image machine... notify a cloud site to pull in that image file? If it did that... even if it just sent a request to a script on the cloud site with the image file name after it, so the cloud site copy do a get request to obtain the image and store it.

    Other ideas...
    Is there a module which will facilitate this?

    Or a local server script which would trigger uploading the newer images to rackspace or amazon so this could work (and still have image machine work)?

    Yet another idea if a module exists... Maybe the module has fields that store the off site location of the file, so the module could ensure that if the product were deleted.. then the cloud api could be notified to remove the image too.

    #2
    This may not be exactly what you're looking for, because all your images do need to be located on your Miva server, but this tutorial walks though how to have all your images served from a CDN. It uses maxcdn, but I've seen a working implementation with Amazon S3 as well:

    http://www.miva.com/blog/how-to-impl...miva-merchant/

    If all your looking for is the performance increase and not trying to free up disk space, this will give you what you're looking for. You could even setup a cname to point to the CDN endpoint so you can have images.domain.com

    Brennan Heyde
    VP Product
    Miva, Inc.
    [email protected]
    https://www.miva.com

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      #3
      I will definitely look at that!

      Freeing up disk space really would be nice too. Recently we had an issue with huge log files preventing processes from happening because we didn't have enough room left on the server. We cleaned that out. But still... The images take a lot more space than the log files.

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