Import your Spoonflower Design Library

Why import your Design Library

Your statements and order emails only mention designs that have actually sold. If a design has never sold, or you just want thumbnails next to every design in Lumitela, that has to come from your Design Library itself.

Bringing your catalog in gives you three things:

• A thumbnail for every design.
• Your complete design list, including designs with zero sales so far, with titles, descriptions and tags.
• The raw material the Design Catalog needs to group colorways: matching designs by what their thumbnails actually look like only works once Lumitela has a thumbnail for each one.

The easy way: the Lumitela extension

Open the extension's Designs tab while you're logged in to spoonflower.com and press Sync. It reads your Design Library page by page and updates your catalog directly, thumbnails, titles, descriptions and tags included, with nothing to save or drop. Its guided first import runs this for you automatically, and it can re-sync on a schedule after that.

If you're on Chrome or a Chromium-based browser, that's the whole guide. The rest of this page is the manual route for everyone else.

The manual way: save your shop pages with SingleFile

SingleFile is a free browser extension that saves a whole web page, images and all, as one file you can drop straight into Lumitela. It works the same way in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.

Chrome

Open the Chrome Web Store and search for "SingleFile". Open the extension's page and click Add to Chrome. Once it's installed, click the puzzle-piece icon in the toolbar and pin SingleFile so its button stays visible.

Edge

Open the Edge Add-ons store and search for "SingleFile". Click Get to install it, then use the extensions menu (the puzzle-piece icon) to pin it to the toolbar. If the Edge store doesn't have it, Edge can also install straight from the Chrome Web Store; turn on "Allow extensions from other stores" if Edge asks.

Firefox

Open Firefox's Add-ons site (addons.mozilla.org) and search for "SingleFile". Click Add to Firefox. Firefox usually pins new extensions automatically; if SingleFile's icon isn't in the toolbar, right-click the toolbar and use "Customize Toolbar" to drag it in.

Save your shop pages

With SingleFile pinned, saving a page is one click:

1. Sign in on spoonflower.com and open the page listing your designs (your shop or studio's design list).
2. Click the SingleFile toolbar button. It saves the whole page, thumbnails included, as one self-contained .html file in your downloads folder.
3. Your design list is probably more than one page. Go to the next page and click SingleFile again, and repeat until you've saved every page you want imported. Only pages you actually save get imported.

Don't want to install an extension? Chrome and Edge can save a single page the same way natively: Save Page As (or Ctrl/Cmd+S), then choose "Webpage, Single File" instead of the default. Lumitela reads that format too, it's just an extra menu per page instead of one click.

As a real-world sense of scale: a shop with 4,633 designs, saved as 43 separate pages, imported in about 41 seconds once dropped in.

Bundle and import

Once you've saved every page, get them to Lumitela however is easiest:

• Zip the saved files into one .zip and drop it on the Import data page.
• Or drop the saved .html files directly, no zipping needed.
• Or click Choose a folder… on the Import data page and pick your whole downloads folder in one go.

If your shop is big enough that zipping everything into one file is awkward, split the saved pages across a few smaller .zip files instead and drop them all together. Lumitela treats them as one import.

However you hand them over, the import runs as a background job. For a large shop you'll see progress as "part 2 of 5" and similar while your thumbnails upload in batches; that's normal and needs no action from you. Stay on the page while it's uploading (Lumitela warns you if you try to navigate away mid-upload), but once the upload finishes, the rest of the work happens on the server, so it's safe to close the tab from there.

What the preflight tells you

Before uploading a single thumbnail, your browser hashes each one and asks Lumitela which of them it already has, byte for byte. Anything unchanged since your last import is skipped; only new or changed thumbnails actually upload. Your design list itself is always refreshed, so a renamed design or a fixed link still updates, even when its thumbnail is skipped.

This is what makes re-running an import safe any time: nothing gets duplicated, and a shop you've already imported once re-imports in a fraction of the time, since most of the thumbnails need no re-upload at all.

After the import

However your catalog came in, your designs and their thumbnails show up in the Design Catalog, and the final report tells you how many were newly added, how many were updated, and how many were skipped as unchanged.

Importing does not group colorways for you. Grouping designs into colorway families is a separate, opt-in step you take afterwards in the Design Catalog; see Design Catalog for how.

Right after the import finishes, Lumitela starts extracting each design's color palette from its thumbnail in the background, deliberately after the import itself so it never slows your thumbnails down. Palettes appear on each design's Spotlight progressively; a large catalog takes a few minutes to work through.