Moving Magento site, missing images in catalog

Recently I have came across one funny issue. Interesting how issue can be funny. One of our clients had a request for Magento upgrade, from version 1.2 to 1.3.2.4. Most of you in in Magento development will likely to agree when I say that Magento upgrades can be a night mare. Luckily for me, this one went rather smoothly with one strange result, half of my product images were not visible on frontend/admin.

After few minutes of debugging I realized what caused the issue. Before I did an upgrade of the site, I pulled entire site locally on my dev machine and set it up so that it runs fully local. Meaning I wanted to upgrade site “offline” on my local machine where its faster and I am not limited to hosting server environment. In the process of “downloading” entire live site to my local machine I forgot the fact that I am using Windows. Windows operating system does not support having two directories, one next to another with the same name like “F” and “f”. It is not case sensitive. Due to this, all my images went to one (first in line) folder.

Once I successfully updated the site and uploaded it to live (Linux powered) server, I ended up with missing photos for about half of my products. Reason being the simple change in folder name from capital to small letter or vice versa.

If you ever do upgrade like I, and come across missing images scenario, try to remember this one.

Cheers