Relationship Image Could Not be Imported to Product Catalog

If you are using the Silverlight-based Product Image Management tool (available from the Commerce Server Business Administration Ribbon of the Solution Storefront) to add an image relationship to a product, the following error may occur when importing the product catalog into the database if the Service Catalog, which is used for multi-image storing, was not imported first: "The relationship Images in the catalog <Adventure Works Catalog> to the target item <item id> could not be imported because the target item does not exist in the catalog."

Product catalogs that rely on the Service Catalog to provide multi-image support have a dependency on the Service Catalog. As a result, the Service Catalog must always be imported into the Commerce Server 2009 R2 database before other catalogs that depend on it. The error described above occurs if the Service Catalog was imported after the product catalogs that rely on it.