Associating Images with Categories

Questions
#1

Note: This may not be appropriate for the developer forums per say. If not, let me know and I will repost.

We are having trouble associating images with categories in the Square Customer Dashboard. There just doesn’t seem to be a feature that allows you to associate an image with a category. I find this odd as the APIs support this directly.

So am I wrong, or is the feature tucked away somewhere where we haven’t looked yet?

#2

Hm, can you share what you mean by the APIs allowing this? As far as I know you can only add images to parent items and nothing else.

#3

Just going off of what I have read…

Uploading an image and attaching it to an item, item variation, or category involves calling the CreateCatalogImage and UpsertCatalogObject endpoints.

In general, the process can proceed in following scenarios:

  • Upload an image file to the catalog.
  • Attach an uploaded image to an existing item, variation, or category.
  • Attach an uploaded image to a new item, variation, or category.

Emphasis added by me.

Taken from…
Upload and Attach an Image

#4

Thanks for bringing this to our attention here! Despite the platform allowing image associations, Square’s Dashboard and POS clients do not surface images on Categories, Modifiers, or Variations – only on Items. There’s opportunity to make this clearer in the developer documentation.

I’d love to hear your use case for Category images. We’re in the process of expanding image functionality, so it’s a great time for input.

#5

My team is working on an online ordering app for a small restaurant chain here in the US. Once you select a location, the list of categories for that location are displayed. We display an image along with each category. (as a workaround we have just baked these images into the app, but our goal/desire is to have 100% of the app’s content sourced from Square.)

#6

This makes a lot of sense, thanks for sharing. Our team is working on image management improvements and expansion, and we hope to share more on this front soon. We share the same goal in making Catalog the source of truth for this sort of information.

#7

@wiggins - Another feature that we would dearly love, since we are focused on Mobile only is the ability to not have any backend other than Square. Today we can not do this due to security limitations, but some secure way of integrating with Square from the device would be a big deal to us.

#8

Is it an authorization issue? Would you be looking for something like Single Sign On?

#9

@wiggins - sorry for the delay in responding. I missed this message when it first came in.

The security issue on mobile is that it is an insecure configuration to bake an access token into a mobile app. Instead mobile apps should use application ids, and then communicate with a secured server that holds the access token. (Scan the forums, this is something that @sjosey and I have discussed in other posts.)

My preference would be to have a cryptographically secure means of communicating between the mobile app and square. Something like an app certificate issued by Square, or registered with square. This way I can use Square as my server and not need to maintain any infrastructure. I get that this would not work for all use cases, but it would for mine.