Product Photography

Product photography means making the pictures that sell a thing online, and they carry more weight than most owners expect. Your customer cannot pick the item up or turn it over, so the photos have to do that for them. Almost every online shop that sells poorly has weak pictures, yet almost nobody names them as the reason.

Start with how many, because four to six pictures per product is the number that works for most shops. That means the front, the back, one from the side and one close enough to show the stitching or the finish. The most useful one has a hand or a coffee cup beside the item so the size is obvious. Clothes need a photo on a person, and anything sold by measurement needs something familiar in the frame, because forty centimetres means nothing to most people.

Keep the background plain and the same across the whole shop, because that is what makes the page look like one shop and not ten. Plain white or a soft grey is the usual choice, and it stays tidy even when the products came from ten different suppliers. Mixed backgrounds are the fastest way to make a real shop look like a market stall.

Then there is file size, and this is where sales quietly disappear. A photo straight off a phone is often four or five megabytes, so six of them on one page is thirty megabytes. Most of your buyers open that page on a phone using mobile data, so it takes many seconds to appear and they leave before seeing the price. Resize each picture to about 1500 pixels on its long side and save it under 200 kilobytes, and it stays sharp. A shop built by Linkysoft shrinks images as they are uploaded, and every website design and development job we take on starts with that setting.

The cost is the part owners underestimate, and it is never the camera but the hours. Sixty products at four photos each, with unpacking, cleaning, shooting and editing, is a week of somebody's time. Worse, it comes back every time you take on a new supplier. Budget for it as a running cost, not a one-off, and shoot in batches of twenty. Linkysoft usually suggests that, because setting up the light and the background is the slow part, not the shutter. Keep the original files safe too, because Storek stores the full-size picture and makes the smaller versions the pages need, so you photograph once and never again.