Merging items?

It would be nice to have a way to merge two items. Both the Dropbox and CsvImport plugins import one file per item, and neither handles multi-image items well (as far as I've been able to tell).

Do you mean merging two items--that contain different metadata, or importing more than 1 file per item?

If using the Dropbox plugin, you can upload a large number of files and then associate more than one file per item by editing an individual item. All of the files in the dropbox will appear with checkboxes in the files tab, and you can add them to items when you are ready.

As for the CSV plugin, it is possible to upload more than one file per item. You do have create a row for each file (add for the max number of files you have for an item), and then add the URL for the file in the appropriate row. When importing map those rows as files and they should upload.

I meant importing more than one file per item. In the short term, my problem's solved: after I asked, I figured out the CSV-plugin approach you've described. That's not a particularly scalable solution for items with more than about 5 images, but it's good enough for now.

What I was actually imagining was an easy solution to the problem where you've put foo1.jpg, foo2.jpg, foo3.jpg ... fooN.jpg into the Dropbox directory. Running a bulk-import produces items #1, #2, #3, ... #N. That's fine as long as every item only relates to a single image, but if foo1.jpg and foo2.jpg should really both be connected to Item #1 (because they're, say, recto and verso of a single-page letter), it's currently troublesome to click through adding foo2.jpg to Item #1 and then deleting Item #2 altogether. That's not such a big deal if you're importing 10 images at a time, but it gets more troublesome when importing 150 items at a time.

In the long run, CSVImport does more of what I need anyway (for large sets of images). What I'd love to see is a toggle setting on CsvImport that allows it to accept URL fields that point to folders (rather than single files.) A URL that points to a folder would cause CsvImport to look for all the images in that folder and attach them to the item being created for that row. (Of course there's a danger that someone will inadvertently point to a folder URL with 500 files in it. To keep from overwhelming the server in such cases of administrator error, I'd suggest a setting for "max number of files to import per item-folder", like the current option for halting on failed image imports.)

Thanks for the suggestions.