Hopefully, you all are enjoying the new Media Gallery.  Many of you have been asking for this feature, and we feel it has the potential to greatly enhance your storefronts.  As you've probably noticed, this new feature completely changes how you use and manage images within QSC.  We want to make your transition to this new feature as easy as possible and have therefore added several help articles explaining the Media Gallery in detail.  But we realize that many of you have questions beyond the scope of the help articles. So, here are some Frequently Asked Questions about the Media Gallery.  Hopefully, you'll find your answers here.

I use gif images to prevent my product thumbnails from being scaled down too small, can I still do this?
With the new Media Gallery, we've built in a more intuitive way to control how your images are scaled.  You can now choose whether you want an image to be scaled or full-size, and you can do this with any image format, not just gifs. To determine whether to scale an image, enter the product's Media Gallery, drag an image to the thumbnail slot, and then click the arrow next to the Thumbnail title.  You are presented with two display options: scale to fit and full size.  To attain the same functionality that you achieved using gifs, select the full size option.  You can come back to the product whenever you want and switch the option that you've chosen.

I use gif images in other parts of my site to prevent scaling, is this still necessary?
No, it's not.  Now, you can use any valid image format and keep the original upload size of the image.  When the image is uploaded, you are presented with the option to scale the image or keep the full size version.  To keep the original size of the uploaded image, select full size.  The one caveat is that the maximum image size is 1024x768.  If it's any larger than that, we'll scale it down to be within those dimensions.

Why do I see three copies of each image in my Media Gallery?
We imported all of your existing images into the Media Gallery.  For many products, you may have used the same image for the thumbnail, standard, and zoom images.  In our system, these are three distinct images with different dimensions, so we added them all to the Media Gallery.  If you have duplicates and want to get rid of them, just keep the version with the largest dimensions.  Those of you who have used different images for thumbnail, standard, and zoom won't see these duplicate images.

There are a lot of images from existing products in my Media Gallery.  Do I need to keep these images or can I delete them?
You can delete the images from your Media Gallery without affecting your products.  We added the existing product images to your gallery so that you could reuse them. However, if you don't plan on reusing them, feel free to delete them from your Media Gallery.

When I upload images, I'm asked to add titles and tags.  What are these for and how do I use them?
We added the tags and titles to help you manage your images.  You can search the Media Gallery for images based on tags and title. Use tags to group images together.  For example, if you sell clothing and apparel, such as shirts, shoes, and hats, you could tag all your pictures of hats with the term "hats."  Then, in the Media Gallery, if you search for the word “hats,” you'll only see images that have the "hats" tag or that have the word "hats" in the title.  You can assign multiple tags to an image by separating them with a comma.  Titles and tags are completely optional, you don't have to add them if you don't want.  When importing images from existing products to the Media Gallery, we used the title of the product for each image's title and we tagged each image with the product's part number and  the term "small," "large,"  or "zoom."

Will changing the default product images update all products currently set to use the default product images?
Yes. The next time you publish, all products set to use the default product images will display the new images.

Is there anyway to set the default display option for thumbnails of new products?
Yes.  This option is available on the Preferences page under the Storefront menu option.  The option is under the Media Gallery Preferences section.  This option will be used as your default option for all new products.