Importing many items and categories

We have a specialized online bookstore and we are working to transfer it onto nopCommerce.
1- We have many subcategories. We cannot create them one by one and I'm looking for a way to import them.
2- How can we import category and product pictures ?

Thanks for your help.
Our site is www.cybersfere.com.

check https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/15498/import-categories-to-sql-category-table.aspx

Thank you for your help, Eduardo.

I think we'll be able to find a way to import our catalogue.
Firts we'll create a table which will include all category and product fields for each item (SKU).
Then we'll apply an SQL Request to insert the datas into the nopCommerce Category and Product tables.
I'm gonna try with some items but I'm confident at this point of the process.

Anyway, I still have some questions :
1- marking the field  "is deleted" to 1, the product will be deleted from the table. Is that true ? It would be very convenient when doing mass updates with 3 possibilities : deleting, adding or updating ;
2- I hope that we can choose the Id field for the Category table and that it is not generated automatically. Actually, we have our own Id's for the categories and we need to control the links between categories and subcategories ;
3- concerning the pictures, I didn't find the way to import them at the same time we import other item datas. We can stock all the pictures in a folder but what to do after knowing that nopCommerce needs to process each one to generate a mini-picture (as far as I understood it) ?

Regards.

Jacques, find the responses below:

cyberSFere wrote:
Marking the delete field to 1 does not delete the product from the table. A product that is deleted from the admin panel is marked as deleted and the admin has to run a query manually to delete the products from the table which are marked as deleted.
cyberSFere wrote:
It is not recommended to choose the ID field although you can. For your purpose there is a field named display ID which serves the purpose. I also have a bookshopp and I use it like the parent category is marked as 1 then all subcategories of that are 1-100, next block starts from 100-199. This will also help organize them in the admin panel.
cyberSFere wrote:
There is no easy way out of the box for bulk uploading images which is a real pain but many people have found a few workarounds. You can search the forum for terms like bulk upload. One such post to get started is
https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/5070/bulk-image-upload.aspx

I don't find the field ID Display in the Category DB. I see Id only and it is generated automatically.
Thanks for your help.

cyberSFere wrote:

It's the same field.  Do you have any existing categories in the DB already?  If it's empty, you could alter the table to disable the automatic generation, insert your categories, then turn the autogeneration back on.  If you have existing entries then you have to worry about primary key violations.

Untested:

SET IDENTITY_INSERT Category ON
GO

--Insert categories here

SET IDENTITY_INSERT Category OFF
GO

Thank you so much. It's really helpful.
Now, we'll have to check how it is possible to import all the category images. We have a lot of categories and I can't conceive doing it one by one!

nopCommerce is a great e-commerce solution but it should include a complete integration system.

Once again, thanks for your help.