Media Images not available in Magento’s product list?
While developing a Magento store, we came across one of those head-scratching moments where everything looks right yet still refuses to play nicely. This time around, we had added a media image attribute for an alternative view of the product. This was to appear in the category product list when a visitor hovered over an item. However, after adding the attribute (code: alt_image), reindexing the catalogue (Product Flat Data) and uploading a file, calls to $_product->getAlt_image() in catalog/product/list.phtml simply returned NULL, despite coming through fine in catalog/product/view.phtml.
This is the story of how we fought Magento’s UI and recovered our missing images.
Dajve Green