How does Bulk Add Hosted Assets work?

Hi,
I’m trying to bulk add hosted assets, inputing web-address like https://website/images/topic1, but what to put in the separator field? I tried out \n and \r as suggested in the not so useful help, but the alert always said “The bulk import could not be completed as no valid URL were identified.”

Yes, I’m new, but the help at “Asset Manager – Blocs – User Documents” doesn’t help me.
And another frustration(for me) is that Blocs seemed to not recognize spaces in file-names. And its also restricted in the characters it recognizes( “|” doesn’t work, “*” seemed to work).
I now had to rename a lot of files.
But I doen´t want to import them in asset-manages separately.
Any help?

Cheers Michael

Edit:
I tried out to put in:
https://website/images/topic1/
https://website/images/another_topic/
https://website/images/just_another_topic/

separated by \n
with same “The bulk import could not be completed as no valid URL were identified.” error!
Blocs 3.5 and 3.4.10
I think bulk import is broken! @Norm

Or, really, do i have to put in every single web-address of every single image??? like

https://website/images/topic1/image1
https://website/images/topic1/image2

https://website/images/topic1/image252
https://website/images/topic1/image253

separated by \n ???

What FTP client are you using? With Forklift I just select a number of images on the server and copy as web urls. Then I go to Blocs to bulk add and click the paste option. It takes seconds and Blocs just handles it without needing to adjust anything. I think this is mainly a case of choosing an FTP client that copies bulk assets with the correct form.

I’ve just tested this and it places a url on every line. It has to be an absolute path though direct to the image, including any subfolders that may be present e.g:

https://example.com/images/1.jpg
https://example.com/images/2.jpg

Thanks,
As said I’m really new to Bloc! I’m using FileZilla, and I’m scared that I have to produce a text-file manually with all the urls.
Thanks for the explanation, this should really go directly in the user-manual. But unfortunately FileZila gives me a url like this ftp://wa4358z@ds25.serverdomain.org/images/image43
So I had to edit this text file.Really painful.

Michael

Can we have a “real” bulk import? @Norm
Something, where i just put in the folder???

We have a real bulk import in Blocs. I can import 1000 images in a matter of seconds. All you need is an FTP client that copies the url properly and there are several that do this. It may even be possible with the old version of Forklift 2 that is available for free on the App Store.

N.B If you are updating sites regularly a pro level FTP app is frankly essential.

Yeah,
Perhaps FileZila isn’t the best. In fact its really a pain. But for the (limited) things that I had to do to this point, it had worked.
But as a warning to users, who copied urls with FileZila, it also scrambled up the file-name :scream:
Now I have a lot of files with a question mark…
So, I had to remove a lot of these files from Asset-Manager manually.
Can we have multiple selection in Asset-Manager?(for deleting and refreshing) @Norm

Thanks
Michael

And @Flashman explanation should really go to user-manual:
“With Forklift I just select a number of images on the server and copy as web urls. Then I go to Blocs to bulk add and click the paste option. It takes seconds and Blocs just handles it without needing to adjust anything. I think this is mainly a case of choosing an FTP client that copies bulk assets with the correct form.” @Norm
This would have helped me tremendously!

So another newbie-problem…
German umlauts, like ä, ü, ö, seemed to not supported in filenames…
Is that common?

And thanks @Flashman , for the tip with forklift!

I don’t know about the German part but special characters are usually best avoided in filenames. There are various German speakers on the forum like @RME who may be able to advise there.

Just seen there is a big discount on Forklift 3 now from their store and it’s a big improvement on version 2. ForkLift 3 - Store - most advanced file manager and FTP client for macOS

Thanks! I purchased and am using. :slight_smile:

Thanks for that. Will consider.

Just another silly newbie question:
If i update my images on server, is Blocs so intelligent, that when i bulk host the whole folder, that it doesn’t add duplicates? @Norm

Thanks

File naming conventions dictate that you should only use characters from the basic latin (unicode block). Characters from the Latin-1 supplement, Latin extended-A, Latin extended-B, and Latin extended Additional (unicode blocks) should be avoided. A full list of characters from each of these blocks can be seen HERE.

Forklift works a lot better when you set up custom workspaces so every bookmark opens exactly as you want. I also save bookmarks inside Dropbox so it can sync across more than one computer. I hope they will allow that over iCloud sometime soon.

Thanks @hendon52
for the explanation of characters! But it seemed that german umlauts are in Latin-1 Supplement
( U+00E4 -> ä ), but that seemed to not work for me.
März becomes(for me unknown reasons) M%C3%A4rz.

But, thanks
I now, after a lot of renaming, and re-uploading, and a whole day bulk-add hosted assets to asset-manager, have to rethink all the whole work. Asset-Manager becomes extremely sluggish, every time I switch groups, and has to rebuild the previews, for minutes…
That’s extremely frustrating!
Why can’t Asset-Manager cache preview images? @Norm

The asset manager is instant for me, so I figure you either have a huge number or images or something else really slow like an old computer, super heavy images, slow internet or slow server. As far as I know it does cache images. Indeed that’s why it has the option to refresh assets with a right click.

Yes, i have a lot of images. And they are big.
But, every time, switching groups in asset-manager, it needs a refresh of previews…

But thanks, for the tip of sale of forklift! sale 9,95$
It seemed that I now can rename with rules, remotely.
That alone, make things so much easier!
And it has a lot of additional functionality! features

I just bought Forklift 3 - thanks @Flashman - it’s on sale for $9.95 instead of $29.95

Forklift has a huge range of features and much more than a simple FTP client. I came over very reluctantly as a longtime Yummy FTP user, which is no longer really an option and I’ve learned to work with Forklift. It’s a very capable app.

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Thats a great price for Forklift 3, I am still running on 2. I’ve grabbed it also. I was waiting for 4, but at that price why wouldn’t you.

I miss Yummy FTP.

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I did buy Forklift to add hosted assets. When copying the url of my images, the url comes out like this.

ftp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/mysite.com/public_html/img/CarouselBackground1240x840.jpg

Blocs cannot handle this url it seems.

Blocs should be able to handle this kind of addresses as well, isn’t that right @Norm?

Anyone have a tips of how to do this?
Possible I could paste it into text edit and replace the ftp address part with https://.