Where the photos go
Online, the photograph is the product.
Nobody can pick it up. Nobody can feel the weight of it or see how the light catches the edge. Every single thing a customer knows about your product before they pay, they got from a picture. Which makes the photography the product page, not a decoration on it.
Two kinds of product photo, and you need both
A packshot is the clean one. Product on white, evenly lit, no distractions, straight on. It is what a marketplace demands, what a comparison shopper wants, and what makes a range of twelve products look like a range rather than twelve unrelated things.
A lifestyle shot is the one that makes somebody want it. In a hand, on a table, in the light it will actually live in. It gives scale, context and a reason to care.
Sell with lifestyle, close with packshots. Stores that only have one of the two feel wrong and generally convert badly, and you can usually tell which half is missing within a second of landing on the page.
A range shot inconsistently reads as a reseller. A range shot consistently reads as a brand.
The rules
Marketplaces have requirements, and they enforce them quietly
Break these and the listing does not usually get rejected with an explanation. It just performs badly, or gets suppressed, and nobody tells you which image caused it.
| Requirement | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| Pure white background on the main image | Marketplaces composite listings into grids. A grey-white product sits in a visible box and looks cheap |
| Product filling about 85 percent of the frame | Too small and it disappears at thumbnail size, which is where the click is won |
| At least 1600 pixels on the long edge | Below this the zoom function does not activate on most platforms |
| No text, logos, borders or watermarks on the main image | A hard rule on Amazon and Google Shopping, and a common cause of silent suppression |
| Consistent angle and scale across a range | So a collection page reads as one shelf and not a jumble sale |
| The same product shown in several views | Listings with multiple images convert measurably better than single-image listings |
The store side
The bit that happens after the shoot
We run our own Shopify stores, so this part is not theory. Getting photography into a store properly is fiddly work that quietly decides whether the page loads fast and whether the images are found at all.
- Each product shot on white plus three to five supporting angles and details
- One lifestyle frame per product, minimum, for the collection page and the ads
- Files named by SKU so a two hundred product upload does not become a manual sorting job
- Alt text written per product, which is how Google Images finds a listing at all
- Sized and compressed for the theme's real render size rather than uploaded at full resolution
- A square crop of everything for Google Shopping and the Meta catalogue feed
If the store itself needs work too, that is our Shopify and e-commerce side. Most of the time the photography and the store are the same project, because there is not much point in beautiful product shots loaded into a theme that renders them at half resolution.
Photography by Allen Velasquez. Used with permission. See his portfolio
Common questions
Product photography, answered
Can you shoot my whole catalogue?
Yes, and per product it gets cheaper the more there are, because the set-up is the expensive part and it gets amortised. Fifty products in a day is realistic for simple items on white. Glassware and anything highly reflective is much slower, because it is lit individually and often focus stacked.
Do I need a white background, or can it be a colour?
For your own website, a colour or a texture is often better and more distinctive. For Amazon and Google Shopping the main image has to be pure white, no argument. The usual answer is to shoot white and brand-coloured variants in the same session, since the product is already lit and on the stand.
What about 360 spins and video?
Worth it for higher-priced items where people hesitate, not worth it for a ten dollar product. Short video clips are the better bet for most stores now, because they carry into the ads and the feed as well as the product page.
We sell through a distributor who supplies images. Is that enough?
It is enough to be identical to every other stockist, which means the only thing left to compete on is price. Your own photography is often the single clearest reason a customer buys from you rather than the same item elsewhere.
Keep going
Where to next
Next step
Let us look at what you have got.
Send over your website, your Google profile, whatever photography you already own. We will tell you straight what is worth keeping, what is costing you, and whether you need a shoot at all. No charge and no pitch attached to it.