WooCommerce: How to Bulk Upload Variation Images

Are you looking for the best way to upload images to multiple product variations in WooCommerce? Maybe you have tried to upload variation images the normal way and realized it’s a difficult and time-consuming task. Well, you’re in the right place because we will show you step by step how to bulk upload WooCommerce product variation images with a spreadsheet. Uploading images to product variations in bulk will allow you to save a lot of time and improve your productivity.

Why is uploading WooCommerce variation images so difficult?

The normal process of adding featured images to product variations is difficult and time-consuming.

This happens because WooCommerce doesn’t allow you to upload variation images in bulk.

The normal process goes something like this:

1. Open a variable product.
2. Go to the variations you want to edit.
3. Upload variation image to one variation.
4. Edit another variation.
5. Repeat as many times as necessary.
6. Save the changes once you’re done editing the variations of one product.
7. Open another product.
8. Repeat the process endless times.

This is a difficult process and takes a lot of time. You could spend lots of hours updating variation images in WooCommerce.

There must be a quick process to upload variation images in bulk.

The best way to bulk upload WooCommerce variation images

The WP Sheet Editor – WooCommerce Products plugin simplifies the administration of your WooCommerce shop by allowing you to view and edit your products and variations in a table.

This plugin allows you to save many hours of work because you can update the data of your WooCommerce variations as if you were using Excel or Google Sheets, but from wp-admin.

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

• Grid product editor for WooCommerce: View and manage your products in a spreadsheet where every row is a product and every column is a field.
• Advanced product/variation search: Use any product field as a search filter to search for products / variations by keyword, attribute, category, tag, price, author, vendor, stock, stock status, etc.
• Powerful variation manager: Create variations in bulk, copy variations from one product to multiple products, bulk remove variations, etc.
• Bulk product / variation editing: Save a lot of time by selecting and bulk updating all selected products and variations 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 WooCommmerce variation images.

View products and variations in a spreadsheet

To view your WooCommerce products and variations in the spreadsheet, go to WP Sheet Editor → Edit products.

You will see all your WooCommerce products displayed on the spreadsheet.

And if you want to view the variations, click on Display variations.

As you see below, the Display variations filter has been activated, and the variations appear next to their parent products.

Option 1 – Bulk upload variation images using the spreadsheet

To add bulk variation images, you need to move to the Featured image column and start uploading the images to your product variations.

After uploading images to all the variations you want to update, click on Save to apply the changes.

Note – The Featured Image column accepts uploading the image / selecting it from the media library and pasting a URL on the cell.

This is a great way to add bulk variation images to different variations using a table / grid variation editor.

Option 2 – Search for variable products and upload variation images

Something to take into account when using the Display variations filter is that the spreadsheet will still display other product types (simple, external, grouped, etc.).

If you want to view variable products with their variations only, you can do it easily.

Start by opening the Search tool.

Now tick the Search on variations checkbox and click on Run search.

After running the search, all the variable products with their variations will be displayed on the spreadsheet.

You’ll see the active search filters above the spreadsheet and the variations next to their parent products.

Now you can move to the Featured image column and start uploading the images to your product variations.

After uploading images to all the variations you want to update, click on Save to apply the changes.

Note – The Featured Image column accepts uploading the image / selecting it from the media library and pasting a URL on the cell.

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

WP Sheet Editor contains a powerful advanced search tool that allows you to use any field of your product variations as search criteria.

This allows you to filter and bulk edit all the results of a specific search.

Here are some examples:

• Bulk upload variation images by category
• Add bulk variation images to all variations containing a specific attribute
• Search for variations missing image and bulk add images
• Bulk upload images to variations containing a specific keyword
• Add bulk variation images by stock status
• And any other use case you can imagine.

In this example, we will run a combined search to find all variations with the following parameters:

• Keyword: Dress
• Category: Fashion
• Status: Published
• Featured image: Empty
• Color (attribute): Red

We need to start by opening the Search tool.

Now we need to set up the search terms:

• Contains keyword: Here we’ll enter the “dress” keyword.
• Next, we need to add the product category; “fashion” in this case.
• Tick the Search on variations checkbox.
• Tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox.
• Status filter: Status (post_status) = Published
• Empty featured image filter: Featured image (featured_image) = [Leave the field empty.]
• Variation color filter: Product Color (pa_color) = [Enter the attribute slug here]. In this case, we’ll enter “red”.
• Click on Run search.

These combined search filters allow us to narrow down the search results to find the specific variations we want to upload bulk images to.

As you see below, we have filtered all the red dresses within the fashion category, which are published and missing featured image.

You can see the active search filters above the spreadsheet.

Now we can proceed to upload the variation images.

1) You can do it using the spreadsheet.

This is great to upload a different image to every filtered variation.

Just move to the Featured Image column, upload the images you want, and click on Save.

2) You can bulk upload the same image to all filtered variations.

If you want to set the same image to all filtered variations, you can open the Bulk Edit tool.

Now you need to select the following values to upload an image to all filtered variations in bulk:

• 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 type of edit: Set value
• You can Upload the file or paste File URL.
• You need to select the Edit only variations option.
• Click on Execute Now.

As mentioned, this is a great option to upload the same image to all the variations you have selected.

But if you want to upload a different image for each variation using the Bulk Editor, you can follow the steps in the next section.

Option 4 – Bulk upload variation images based on SKU

A great thing if you use a different SKU for each variation is that you can upload images of variations based on the variation SKU.

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

You 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 variations at once.

To attach the images to all the selected variations at once based on the SKU, you need to open the Bulk Edit tool.

Now 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 type of edit: Set value
• Add this on the File URL field: $_sku$.jpg
  • Make sure you use the right file extension (.png, .jpg, etc.)
• Select the Edit only variations option.
• Click on Execute Now.

Adding WooCommerce bulk variation images based on product SKU is a great way to save a lot of time!

In just a few minutes, you can upload images to lots of product variations. Forget about having to open variations one by one to add images to them.

Option 5 – Bulk import variation images from CSV

WP Sheet Editor allows you to bulk import variation images from a CSV file.

Let’s see how to update variation images by importing the data.

Important. The variation images must be on your media library, so you may need to first upload the images.

You need to have a CSV containing your variations data, especially the ID and the Featured image columns.

As you can see below, we have exported our variations data and have added the image URLs.

Now we can proceed to import the variation images from the CSV.

First, we need to open the Import tool.

Second, we need to select the CSV file we will import.

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

Third, we need to map the columns to import them into WordPress.

We can either Import all the columns or Select individual columns to import.

Fourth, we need to select how we will import the variation images.

In this case, we will Update existing items, ignore new items.

We will match the CSV data to the WordPress data using the ID field. This will allow us to import the data without mistakes.

Click on Next.

Finally, you can click on The preview is fine, start import.

In this tutorial, we have shown you how to upload WooCommerce variation images in bulk.

Managing variation images is difficult if you use the normal process in WooCommerce, but WP Sheet Editor simplifies the task completely.

You can use the spreadsheet to bulk update the variations’ featured images as if you were using Excel, Google Sheets or any other CSV editor, but everything is done on wp-admin.

Besides, you can upload variation images by keyword, category, attribute, stock status, stock, SKU, price, status, etc. This is great if you want to set the same image to all variations containing specific search terms.

However, if you want to bulk upload a different image to every product variation, you can upload the images based on the variation SKU.

Of course, you can also import variation images from a CSV file edited with Excel, Google Sheets, or any other CSV editor.