Product images are crucial for selling your products online. Managing these images can be done in several ways. Go to the setup card (Administration > Setup) and you will see that there are 3 different options for storing your Media.
Database, External and Azure Storage - File Share.
External (Larger Catalogs)
For larger catalogs, where you do not want to store the images in the database, we also have the option to use External Storage. Use this in case you want to work with extenal URLs. In this case images can be hosted on a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or any other type of publicly accessible external location.
In order to configure this navigate to Administration > Setup and scroll down to the media section. Select the Media Storage Type ''External''.
An example situation in which you might want to consider using an External Storage or an Azure Storage is provided below.
If you have 50.000 items which all have 10 images that are 1 Megabyte each. Then storage calculation looks like this:
50.000 x 10 x 1 Megabyte = 500.000 Megabyte = 500 Gigabyte
For these scenario's you want to look at the other options, External and Azure Storage - File Share because this amount of data stored in your Business Central database will cause performance issues.
External means that you will be working with external URL's. This means that your product images can be stored anywhere on the internet or in an online storage (e.g. CDN) which is publicly accessible. Once you switch to using external URL's, you cannot drag and drop files anymore. Instead the External Content URL field will become visible when you navigate to Content > Images. This field can be used to either enter data manually, or you can use BC Configuration Packages (Excel imports) to quickly import many image at once. The manual process is explained below.
When you are on your Magento Item Card in Business Central and navigate to Content > Images you will be able to add your external content URL of the image you want to add to the Magento Item.
Click ''New'' and paste your External Content URL in the column External Content URL and press the tab button on your keyboard. Now you will see that a new media record is created.
When you go back to your Magento Item you will see that a second media record is displayed with the storage type External.
Please note that if the external URL changes without manually updating the URL in Business Central, the image is not accessible anymore and will not be shown!
Pro's of Using External Storage:
- If you have a publicly accessible storage with permanent URL's this is a very quick and easy way to get your images in your Magento store.
- You don't save your images in the Business Central database which prevents performance issues due to image storage.
Con's of Using External Storage:
- If an image URL changes the image URL will not automatically change and therefore the product will not have an image anymore.
- The images are not automatically saved in a Business Central backup.