With the latest versions of web browsers officially dropping support of Flash by the end of 2020, our one and only Flash widget, the Multi File Uploader that has existed within the Administration Centre over the past 14 years has been rebuilt from scratch using native web libraries.

The Multi File Uploader can be used to bulk upload product image files from your local machine to the Administration Centre, as well as for category images. This is found under the Data menu, within the Product Images Import and Category Images Import menu items, within the Multiple Images File Uploader tab. The uploader is also found within the Websites menu, within the Websites interface, upon clicking on either an attachment library, or image library of a website, within the Library page.

Originally the Multi File Uploader was built in Flash since only Flash could support the user in being able to select multiple files on a computer for upload in the mid 2000s. Later on this multi-file selection capability was added to the web browser standards and now every modern browser supports this capability, and has for some time. Flash has been on the nose ever since Apple dropped support for it with its iOS based devices, due to its complexity, licensing and security vulnerabilities. Over time browsers have also made it more difficult to load Flash plugins for the same reasons.

So in light of this its time for us to say goodbye to Flash for good and we have rebuilt the Multi File Uploader using native web libraries, that allow it to work across all modern web browsers and devices. We have made it behave very similar to Flash uploader, but there are a couple of differences:

 
• Users first click the Select Files To Upload button to select one or more files from the local computer that need to be uploaded. Alternatively users can now drag and drop files from a File Browser window directly onto the Select Files To Upload button.

 
• The files selected will be queued up, awaiting to be uploaded.

 
• Once the Start Images/Files Upload button has been pressed then each file will be sequentially be uploaded one-by-one. Users can now see percentage rate of the file currently being uploaded, as well as see if it successfully uploaded, or if not the reason why it had failed to upload.

 
• If the Stop Images/Files Uploads button is pressed while queued files are being uploaded, then any files in the queue not yet uploaded will be cancelled from being uploaded.

 
• If the Clear File/Image Upload List button is pressed then any files attempting to be uploaded will be cancelled, and the list of files will be cleared out, as well as any warning messages.

 
• Only files that are within the file size limits are able to be added to the queue, this is 2MB for image files, and 15MB for non image files. The file size limits ensure that end users viewing and downloading the files can do so at a fast rate.

Once the files have attempted to be uploaded, the files can no longer be uploaded again, unless the same file is added to the queue again. This is a key difference to the Flash uploader, which would previously allow the same file in the list to be uploaded again.