Stuart

... which I have been looking into for months and still not found an answer

Wow - time flies and I've still not resolved this issue.  I use excel uploading and put most pictures on by ftp, so it hasn't really affected me for the sties with the problem ... still a bit annoying as you can't simply go in an edit the individual products as each time you click update the bloody picture info is deleted.  I'm not the only person with this issue, but it seems to be different generally for everyone.  

What annoys me is that there is a certain saying which starts with "if it ain't broke" - updating software is all very well, but some of the side effects can be very detrimental.  I design jewellery by CAD for a living and the software upgrades on that are the same - what's worse is they cost an arm an a leg each time (£1000's) and you end up with backwards compatibility issues, functions that worked well are now somewhat diminished in their use, annoying changes in workflows (which no doubt the designers of the software think works great for them but they give little thought to the fact that everyone has a different workflow routine), etc

Anyway - I'm ranting ... I'll try again and see if there is a definitive solution to this

Thanks for those two suggestions - I think I'm going to mess around with htaccess and see what that does.  Seems like the quickest solution.  I'll post backcsoon

I did this ages ago with a bookstore site - I got a program called reader ware and a scanner - scanned all the books in and the program dragged all the images off the internet, then exported the full details of each book in a batch (in this case it was around 10,000-20,000 unique products) to excel and wrote a quick excel vba file to sort the exported file to easy populate format.  I exported all the images to a folder, uploaded them all to the images directory ... I have already installed and modified an autothumb creator which worked on the fly.  Then I ran easy populate and bingo the whole thing worked fine.

When the client wanted to add books, all he did was scan into reader ware adding the book to that database and run a script I had written to upload everything - he did this twice a day - mostly only making changes to the database for items sold, changed etc.

My advice - use easy populate and a proprietary library database - you can get them for you iPhone now and export them in delimited text - the images you already have so this is a really simple use of easy populate - all you do is copy and paste columns to the right place in a demo file which you download from your own server showing you which fields do what - its all column and line based so it would be easy to do manually for the first upload - you could do 100s of thousands of records like this in a few hours

Have fun

Thanks Gergely - but the image upload is not the problem (for the benefit of other readers the fix was purely error messages which let you know if the image destination is present, writable or you are overwriting another image - unless I've missed something else)

The problem is that the image name in not writing to the database.  The old code worked fine under previous versions of php.  Upgraded servers to php 5.3.x have resulted in some people getting this problem after applying fixes for depreciated code throughout osccommerce versions which are not specifically written for php 5.3 - MS2.2 and below.

If you have sites like mine that are heavily modded - then its not just a case of replacing the problem files or code with those from the latest version of osc.  The problem here is likely to be server side, but its not the tmp directory, the php.ini, etc as the images are uploading to the right place properly and are on the server.  The problem is that the image name, which is parsed from the image at upload is not writing to the product_image_name field in the database.

In my case I have sites with exactly the same code on on the same server which work fine and sites which have this problem.  As all the server side is exactly the same on all of my sites, this is very perplexing.  I have no idea why one site should work and the other not under the same conditions, and neither does the host - I have spent hours talking to them and they are as confused as I am with the whole thing.  I have a few theories but they are most unlikely.  Its just strange.

If I find an answer I'll post it here