Add photos to many dishes at once

Adding photographs one dish at a time is fine for ten dishes and miserable for two hundred. The bulk upload takes a folder of photographs and a small spreadsheet that says which file belongs to which dish, and does the whole menu in one go.

Panel Menu Bulk menu photos

How it works

1. 1
   Download the template

   It comes out as image_mapping.csv, already filled with every dish on this location's menu: its id, its category and its name.

2. 2
   Write the file names in

   One column is left empty — photo_file_name. Put the exact name of the photograph for that dish there, extension included: margherita.jpg. Leave the row empty for a dish that needs no new photograph.

3. 3
   Choose the file and the photographs

   Drop the spreadsheet and the images onto the page, or pick them with the two buttons. The photographs go up in batches of ten, and the progress is shown as it runs.

4. 4
   Check the list

   The table underneath says how many dishes now have a photograph, and filters down to the ones that still do not.

What it expects

• File names must match exactly, including the extension and the capitals. This is the single commonest reason a row does nothing.
• Only dishes from this location's own menu, by the id in the first column.
• Ten photographs per batch, done for you one batch after another; up to 2,000 rows in the spreadsheet.
• Images: JPEG, PNG or WebP. They are resized and converted after upload, so a photograph straight off a phone is fine.

Getting the photographs right

• One dish per photograph, shot from the same angle and on the same surface. A menu is a set, not a collection.
• Daylight, no flash. The flash is what makes food look like a police photograph.
• Square-ish crops survive every layout; very wide ones get cut on a phone.
• Better absent than bad: half a menu photographed well reads better than all of it photographed badly.