A catalogue run comes back filed the way you uploaded it

A bulk shoot ends in a single download. Fifty products, three to six photos each, and one button that hands back one file. It is the least examined moment in the whole run, because by then the interesting part looks finished — and it is the moment that decides whether the next two hours are spent filing or working.

Open one and the shape is immediate. There is a folder for the run, named after the run itself or, if you never named it, after the date you started it. Inside it there is one folder per product. Inside each of those are that product's photos. Nothing is loose, and nothing is flat.

What is worth knowing is that none of those names were invented at download time. Every one of them was decided by you, earlier, in a step that did not look like a filing decision.

The folder names are your grouping

A product's folder carries the product's own name — the name the run knew it by. On the web, that name comes from how the photos were grouped when they went in, which for most sellers means the filenames. Group by filename and the archive comes back reading emerald-halo-earrings, rose-gold-band, oxidised-cuff. Upload fifty files called IMG_4471 and the archive is honest about it: you get folders named after whatever the run had to work with, and in the worst case a numbered placeholder, because a name that sanitises down to nothing is replaced rather than left blank.

In the Shopify app the question does not arise in the same way, because the products are picked from the catalogue and arrive with their own titles attached. That is the quiet argument for running a catalogue shoot from the store rather than from a folder on a laptop: the naming problem is already solved by the store.

Either way the names are cleaned before they are written. Slashes, colons, quotes and the other characters a file path cannot hold are replaced with hyphens; runs of spaces collapse; leading dots go; anything past eighty characters is cut. So a product called "Ring — 18ct / rose" arrives as a folder you can open on any machine, spelled slightly differently from the way you wrote it. That is a feature, and it is also the reason a name that leans on punctuation loses the part that distinguishes it.

The numbers are your running order

Each folder is prefixed with a two-digit number, and that number is the position the product held in the run — not its alphabetical place, and not the order the renders happened to finish in. Whatever sequence the queue was built in is the sequence the archive lists.

This is more useful than it sounds. A catalogue shoot is usually a collection with an internal order — the hero piece, then the range, then the accessories — and that order normally lives only in a spreadsheet or in someone's head. Queue the run in it and the order survives into a directory listing that sorts itself. Queue the run in whatever order the files happened to sit in and you have thrown away a piece of information you will want back when you are writing the collection page.

Inside a product folder the same logic repeats one level down: files are numbered in shot order and named after the shot's role, so the packshot, the on-model frame and the macro are identifiable without opening them. That ordering is not arbitrary either — it is the spine described in the post about which three photos are already spoken for.

The count you unzip is not the count you ran

Here is the one thing the archive will not announce. A product whose photos did not render is not represented in it at all. There is no empty folder, no placeholder, no note. It is simply absent, and the numbering carries on around the gap.

So the archive is a reliable record of what succeeded and a silent one about what did not. Count the folders. If you queued forty-eight products and the archive holds forty-six, two products need looking at — and the two-digit prefixes tell you exactly which positions are missing, which is faster than comparing two lists by eye. The run's own page is where the reason lives; the archive is only where the discrepancy shows up.

This is also why the archive is worth opening before you start uploading anything anywhere. A missing folder discovered now is one re-run. A missing folder discovered after you have worked through forty-five listings is a second pass through the part of the job that is genuinely tedious.

Why the download sometimes takes a minute

A large run's archive is assembled when it is asked for, not held ready. Click the download on a finished run that has never been downloaded and the page waits while the file is built, which for a few hundred megabytes is a minute or two. It is built once and the link works from then on.

That is worth knowing mostly so the wait does not read as a failure. A run of fifty products carrying six photos each is a substantially bigger object than anything else this tool hands over, and it is the only artefact that has to be gathered from fifty separate places before it can be handed to you at all.

What to decide before the run, then

Three things, and none of them takes longer than a minute. Name the run, so the top-level folder is not a date you will not recognise in a fortnight. Group the photos by the names you actually use for the products, because those names are the folders you will be working inside. And queue the products in the order the collection has, not the order the files were sitting in.

None of that changes a single pixel of what is rendered. It changes how long the hour after the render takes, which for a catalogue shoot is the hour that decides whether fifty products actually reach fifty listings.