Bulk Upload WooCommerce Product Images – 5 Methods

Are you looking for the best way of uploading product images in bulk for your WooCommerce store? Maybe you’ve spent a lot of time trying to add images to your WooCommerce products, and would like to find a quick way to bulk edit product images without having to spend lots of hours. Well, this complete guide to bulk upload WooCommerce product images is for you.

Uploading product images takes time!

You may have noticed that uploading images to your WooCommerce products takes a lot of time. You need to open each product, upload the image, save the changes, and repeat the process as many times as needed. This makes the normal way of adding WooCommerce product images difficult and time-consuming.

We know you think the must be a better bulk product image process. And there is…

Introducing the best way to upload bulk images

In the sections of this tutorial, we will show you several methods to upload images in bulk to your WooCommerce store.

More specifically, you will learn how to:

• Upload images to different products using a spreadsheet/table on wp-admin
• Set the same image to all products missing product image
• Upload an image to all products within a specific category
• Bulk upload images from external URLs
• Bulk import products with images from a CSV file

To bulk add WooCommerce product images, we will use the WP Sheet Editor plugin.

It allows you to manage your WooCommerce products and variations using a grid product editor.

The plugin contains some cool features designed to boost your productivity:

• Product table editor: View and manage your products in a spreadsheet where every row is a product and every column is a field.
• Advanced product search: Use any product field as a search filter to search for products by keyword, attribute, category, tag, price, author, vendor, stock, stock status, etc.
• Easy product duplicates: Create hundreds of copies out of a product with a few clicks.
• Powerful variation manager: Create variations in bulk, copy variations from one product to multiple products, bulk remove variations, etc.
• Bulk product editing: Save a lot of time by selecting and bulk updating all selected products with a few clicks. Make massive changes to your WooCommerce store within minutes.

After installing and activating WP Sheet Editor – WooCommerce products, you need to follow the steps in the sections below in order to easily bulk upload product images to your WooCommerce products.

Open the plugin

To view and manage your products in a spreadsheet, go to WP Sheet Editor > Edit products.

Here’s a screenshot of the spreadsheet we’ll use to upload bulk product images:

Now you can proceed to explore any of the different options to bulk add WooCommerce product images.

Option 1 – Upload product images using the spreadsheet

The first way to increase your productivity by uploading images to many WooCommerce products is to use the spreadsheet.

Just go to the “Featured Image” column and start uploading or editing your product images.

Pro tip. To simplify this process even further, you can search for products missing featured image.

For this you can use the Search tool, which allows you to use any product field as a search filter.

Once you have opened the Search tool, tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and select these values to find all products without product image:

• Field: Featured image
• Operator: =
• Value: Leave this field empty
• Click on Run search.

After running the search, you can start uploading images using the spreadsheet.

Once you’re done uploading the images, click on Save to apply the changes.

It’s a great way to bulk upload images to different products.

Option 2 – Set the same image to all products missing image

Some WooCommerce stores use a default image when they don’t have the product photos yet, and here we want to show you how to put the same image to all the products that don’t have an image. This will completely simplify the process of uploading product images in bulk.

First, we need to search for all products missing product image.

We need to start by opening the Search tool.

Once we’re on the search tool, let’s tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and select these values to find all products without product image:

• Field: Featured image
• Operator: =
• Value: Leave this field empty
• Click on Run search.

After running the search, all products missing featured image will be displayed on the spreadsheet, and we need to open the Bulk Edit tool.

Now we need to select these values to upload the same image to all the selected products:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
• What field do you want to edit: Featured Image
• Select the type of edit: Set value
• You can either Upload the image/select the image from the media library or Paste the File URL. The image must be on your server.
• Click Execute Now.

And done. This is how you can upload a specific default image to all products missing featured image on your WooCommerce store.

Option 3 – Bulk upload images by keyword, category, attribute, etc.

With WP Sheet Editor you can upload bulk images to all products containing a specific keyword in the title, all products within a specific category, all products containing a specific attribute, etc.

For this you need to first use the Search tool in order to filter your products by keyword, category, attribute, etc.

Now you need to enter the search terms to filter your products.

In this example, we will make a combined search where our products must have these parameters:

• Keyword: Dress
• Category: Women
• Product color (attribute): Red
• Stock: Equal to or fewer than 20
• Product type: Simple
• Status: Published
• Feature image: Missing

Once you have selected the search filters, click on Run search.

This combined search is a great way to narrow down our search terms to find specific products/groups of products. It allows you to make sure we’re editing the right products.

Now we have two ways to upload the product images.

First, we can use the spreadsheet as we showed you in Option 1 in this tutorial.

Second, we can use the Bulk Edit tool to upload the same image to all the selected products.

Once on the bulk edit tool, we need to select these values:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
• What field do you want to edit: Featured Image
• Select the type of edit: Set value
• You can either Upload the image/select the image from the media library or Paste the File URL. The image must be on your server.
• Click Execute Now.

Option 4 – Bulk upload product images from external URLs

There are useful plugins like the Featured Image From URL (FIFU) plugin, which allows you to add featured images to posts and products from external URLs. This means that the image files don’t have to be on your server in order to add them as featured images.

And since the FIFU plugin adds fields to your products, you can edit those fields with WP Sheet Editor to easily add featured product images in bulk.

Besides WooCommerce and WP Sheet Editor, you need to install and activate the Featured Image From URL (FIFU) plugin and the WP Sheet Editor – Featured Image from URL (FIFU) extension.

Once you have set up everything, you may need to go to Settings > Scan DB to find fields to display the columns (fields) added by the FIFU plugin on the spreadsheet:

• Fifu Image Url: This column allows you to add the external image URL.
• Fifu Image Alt: This column allows you to add alt text to the images added from external URL.

Now you have at least three options to bulk add featured images from external URL.

1- You can use the spreadsheet.

To upload images from external URL to different products using the spreadsheet, go to the Fifu Image Url column and start pasting the external URLs in the cells.

Once you’re done adding image URLs, click on Save to apply the changes.

2- You can use the Bulk Edit tool.

You can set the same image from an external URL in bulk for all your products.

Optional – You can search for products by keyword, category, stock, etc.

In this example, we will open the Search tool and make a combined search where our products must have these parameters:

• Keyword: Dress
• Category: Women
• Product color (attribute): Red
• Stock: Equal to or fewer than 20
• Product type: Simple
• Status: Published
• Feature image: Missing

Once you have selected the search filters, click on Run search.

After running the search, let’s open the Bulk Edit tool.

Now we need to select the following values:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
• What field do you want to edit: Fifu Image Url
• Select the type of edit: Set value
• Paste the external image URL here.
• Click Execute Now.

Option 5 – Bulk import product images from CSV

Importing images to your WooCommerce products from a CSV file is a great way to edit hundreds or thousands of products easily.

Whether it’s images hosted on the server or external images, it’s very useful to be able to add the URLs of the images in a CSV file using Excel, Google Sheets or any other CSV editor.

You need to have a CSV file that contains at least the following columns:

• Product ID
• Featured Image/Fifu Image Url

Once you have a CSV containing the featured image URLs, you can start bulk importing the featured image data into WordPress to update product images.

First, open the Import tool.

Second, select the CSV file you want to import:

• Source: CSV file from my computer
• Click on Choose File and find the CSV on your computer
• Click on Next

Third, sure to map your image fields as corresponds:

1. If you’re importing internal image URLs, map the image column to the Featured Image field.
2. If you’re importing external image URLs, map the image column to the Fifu Image Url field.

Fourth, select how you want to import the images:

• Do you want to create or update items: In this example, we will Update existing items, ignore new items.
• Now make sure you match the product ID column with the ID field.
• Click on Next.

Finally, you will see a preview. If everything is OK, click on The preview is fine, start import to start uploading featured image data.

Option 6 – Upload images based on the product SKU

You can upload an image for each of the selected products based on the product SKU.

Important: The filename of the images you’ll upload must be the same as the product SKU.

You just need to follow these simple steps:

First, upload the images normally in the WordPress Media Library

1. Go to Media in wp-admin
2. Click Upload
3. Select all the images you want to upload
4. Upload them all at once. Just be careful with your server capacity.

Second, attach the images to all the selected products at once

To attach the images to all the selected products at once based on the SKU, you need to select the following values in the Bulk Edit tool.

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
• What field do you want to edit: Featured Image
• Select the type of edit: Set value
• File URL: $_sku$.jpg
  • Make sure you use the right file extension (.png, .jpg, etc.)
• Click Execute Now.

With the $_sku$.jpg value in the File Name field, the plugin will search on the filename of the images you uploaded and match them with the product SKUs to add the right images to the products.

Avoid 404 errors when bulk editing image filenames

Bulk upload variation images

We have prepared a tutorial that shows you step by step how to bulk upload image in your WooCommerce variations.

You can read it by clicking here.

Bulk upload WooCommerce product images

WP Sheet Editor allows you to upload images to thousands of products in bulk. The plugin is designed to simplify your WooCommerce product management to the max with advanced search, easy bulk editing, product duplication, product export, product import, and other cool features.