Datafeedr Integration
External Images includes an option to prevent Datafeedr from downloading featured images to your site, either when product sets run or when your archive pages load for the first time.
This allows you to build far larger websites without using up all your storage space storing images which are already hosted on affiliate CDNs.
Datafeedr normally pulls a copy of every product image onto your server. On a large affiliate catalogue that is tens or hundreds of gigabytes of duplicated files, plus the WordPress resize copies of each one. Leaving the images on the merchant CDN removes that storage and the processing that goes with it.
It also integrates with the other Datafeedr widgets to spoof those widgets into using the external images instead of displaying a placeholder.
If you are using Datafeedr, visit Settings -> External Images and enable the option to prevent Datafeedr from downloading and importing images to your website.
Skipping the image download also makes Product Set imports finish faster, because the slow part of an affiliate import is usually fetching and resizing images rather than writing product rows. For very large catalogues, pair this with Super Speedy Imports to speed up the product writes themselves.
Datafeedr Check Image Sizes option
Datafeedr provides two URLs for images – merchant_image_url and _dfrps_featured_image_url. By default, it will prefer the ‘merchant_image_url’ but if you wish you can have External Images check the images inside these two fields and use the biggest one.
To have External Images perform this check, enable the ‘Check Image Sizes’ option under the ‘Datafeedr Settings’ section in Settings->External Images. This check is performed when the images are loaded for the first time.
If you have already loaded images and the ‘ei_converted’ custom meta field already exists against your products, the normal Product Sets import will reset this flag, or you can manually reset it by editing the custom meta for the product, or by importing the ‘ei_converted’ meta field with a value of 0.
The ei_converted flag is how External Images remembers it has already picked the biggest image for a product. Set it back to 0 on any product you want re-checked, for example after the merchant swaps in a larger image.
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