Register stock items from photos

Open in TWICE Admin

inventory/stock-items

Upload Images is one of the three ways to register stock. Instead of typing the unit’s details, you pick photos of it and TWICE reads them: it recognises what is in the first image, matches it to a category in the taxonomy, and fills the name and attributes from that. It saves the most time on stock you cannot describe from memory — second-hand intake, a mixed pallet, anything where the category matters and nobody wants to look it up. It is a suggestion, not an import: everything it fills in is editable before you register, and this guide is mostly about what to check. For the manual path and how stock items bind to a SKU, see Register stock items.

Prerequisites

Required permissions:

inventory:stock_item:create — registering, and creating the draft the suggestion is built on
inventory:stock_item:view — fetching the suggestion itself
inventory:stock_item:manage — writing your edits onto that draft when you submit
inventory:stock_item:delete — Cancel, which deletes the draft again

All four system roles hold all four. A custom role that grants create without delete can start this flow but cannot clean up after cancelling it — see the pitfalls below.

Before you start, have ready:

The photos, already uploaded. The picker browses the file manager’s article folder; it does not upload from your desktop. Put the images there first.
One clear photo of the unit per item. Only the first image is analysed — see below.
A decision on tracking. Whether these units are tracked individually or as a pooled quantity is set in the same dialog and is easier to get right now than later.

The Walkthrough

Open the register menu

Go to Inventory > Stock items and select Register Items in the top right. A command palette opens with three ways in:

Action	Shortcut	What it does
Manual Entry	`n`	Type the details yourself
Upload Images	`u`	This flow
Import CSV	`i`	Bulk import from a spreadsheet

The Register Items button itself is on a.

Pick the photos

Upload Images opens the file manager, browsing the article folder and filtered to images. Select the photos for this unit and confirm.

The picker only offers files that are already in the file manager. If the photos are still on your machine, upload them there first — the flow has no upload step of its own.

Wait for the recognition

The Register new stock item dialog opens with a progress bar across the top and every field disabled while it runs.Behind that bar, TWICE saves a throwaway draft stock item to hang the images on, then works through the photo: it describes what it sees, finds the closest category in the taxonomy, and from that description suggests a name and a set of attributes for that category.The draft is invisible in the Stock items table and is turned into your real item when you submit.

Check what it filled in

When the bar clears, the fields are editable and some are already populated. Three things came from the photo:

Name — always overwritten with the suggestion when there is one.
Category — set only if you had not already chosen one.
Attributes — added only if the item had none, and this is the one you cannot see. The dialog has no attributes field, so suggested attributes are carried silently and created when you register. Check them on the item’s Attributes tab straight afterwards.

Everything is editable. Correcting the name here is normal.

Fill in the rest

The suggestion does not touch these, and two of them decide the shape of what you get:

Item Codes — Auto-generate, or Manual to type your own. Manual replaces the Quantity field with a code list, and the number of codes becomes the number of units.
Track individually — on, each unit is its own record with its own history. Off, they are one pooled quantity.
Quantity — how many units to create. Only shown when codes are auto-generated.
SKU — search by name or by code to bind these items to an existing SKU.
Entry Location, Entry date, Entry status — where and when the stock enters, and whether it is Active or Inactive on arrival.

Select Register Stock Items.Where you land depends on the quantity. One unit opens that item’s page. More than one creates the rest — all sharing the same photos — and opens them together in a bulk edit session, so you can set anything that differs per unit in one pass.

How do I know it worked?

The item opens on its own page (or the batch opens in bulk edit), with the name that was in the dialog when you submitted.
The photos are on the item, on every unit in the batch, not just the first.
The attributes the photo produced are on the Attributes tab. This is the check worth making every time, because it is the one thing the dialog never showed you.
The category is set on the item’s General tab.

Troubleshooting / Common Pitfalls

The dialog opened but nothing was filled in

Cause: the suggestion came back empty. That happens quietly, with no error, in three cases: the images did not reach the draft, the photo could not be described, or the description matched no category in the taxonomy closely enough.What to do: fill the dialog in by hand — it is a normal registration form at that point. If it keeps happening on photos that clearly show the item, the picture is probably the problem rather than the item: a single unit against a plain background, filling the frame, recognises far better than a shelf or a pallet.

"Recognition failed"

Cause: the suggestion call itself errored, rather than returning nothing.What to do: the message sits above the form and the form still works, so you can carry on and type the details in. The draft has already been created, so do not close the dialog and start again unless you mean to — use Cancel, which cleans it up.

I uploaded five photos and it only recognised one thing

Working as designed. Only the first image is analysed. The rest are attached to the item but contribute nothing to the name, category, or attributes.What to do: put the clearest, most representative shot first. If the photos show genuinely different items, register them separately — one flow produces one item or one batch of identical units, not one item per photo.

Attributes I did not expect appeared on the item

Cause: the suggestion adds attributes for the category it matched, and the dialog gives you no way to see or remove them before registering. They are created as new text attributes on the inventory resource.What to do: open the item’s Attributes tab after registering and remove what does not belong. Worth knowing that they are created as real attributes on your account, so a wrong match adds to your attribute list, not just to the item — see Attributes.If the item already had attributes, none are suggested at all. Only an empty item gets them.

I cancelled, and I want to know what happened to the draft

Cancel deletes it. The draft stock item created to carry the images is removed when you cancel, so nothing is left behind in the table.The exception is permissions. Deleting needs inventory:stock_item:delete. On a custom role granting create but not delete, cancelling leaves the draft in place. It is in draft status so it does not show in the normal lists — look under Settings > Archived assets or ask someone with the permission to clear it.

The name it suggested is wrong for how we refer to this item

Expected. The suggestion describes what is in the photo, in general terms. It does not know your naming convention, your supplier’s model names, or the shorthand your staff use.What to do: overwrite it. The name field offers names already in use on your account, so picking an existing one keeps naming consistent — and consistent names are what make SKU binding and the inventory table’s grouping useful later.

Next Steps