How to Edit Your Product Images and Marketing Photography for Your Shopify Store

You can edit product images without leaving Shopify. Open any product, click an image, and Shopify's media editor lets you crop, resize, rotate and draw, remove or replace the background, and write the alt text. What it doesn't do is color correction, so fix white balance and exposure in a separate editor before you upload.

This guide covers the whole path from camera to product page: Shopify's image requirements, how to use the media editor, which free tools fill the gaps, how to shoot photos that need less editing, and how to keep banners and campaign images from being cropped badly by your theme.

The short version

1. Shoot on a plain background in soft, even light.
2. Correct color and exposure in a photo editor so the product looks the way it does in real life.
3. Crop every main product image to the same aspect ratio. Square is the safest choice.
4. Export at about 2048 × 2048 pixels, under 20 MB, as PNG or JPEG, with a descriptive file name.
5. Upload to the product, then use Shopify's media editor for final crops, the background and alt text.

Shopify product image requirements

You don't need to convert images to WebP yourself. Shopify's image CDN resizes images for each screen and serves modern formats such as WebP or AVIF to browsers that support them. Your job is to upload one clean, large original.

How to edit product images in Shopify

The media editor opens from anywhere an image appears in your admin: a product's Media section, Content → Files, or the theme editor.

1. Go to Products, open the product, and click the image thumbnail in the Media section. The file editor opens.
2. Crop and transform. Drag the frame around the part you want to keep. Choose Square to match a square grid, Original to keep the photo's ratio, or Freeform for any shape.
3. Resize. Set new pixel dimensions, with the option to lock the aspect ratio. Useful for bringing an oversized camera file down to around 2048 px.
4. Rotate. Turn the image clockwise or flip it.
5. Draw. Add a quick mark with a chosen color and brush size. Handy for pointing out a detail, but keep product images clean.
6. Alt text. In the Edit information section, click the Alt text field and describe the image. Shopify may suggest AI-written alt text for images that don't have any; review it before you click Accept.
7. Click Save.

Saving on desktop updates the original image everywhere it's used. If you change your mind later, you can revert an edited image back to the original, even after saving. On the mobile app, the editor only crops, and saving creates a new copy instead of replacing the original.

Remove or replace a background

A plain background makes a product grid look calm and consistent. Shopify can do this for you with Shopify Magic, its built-in AI tools, inside the same editor:

• Remove the background to make it transparent, or replace it with a solid color. Shopify detects the product automatically, and you can correct the selection by hand where it gets an edge wrong.
• Generate a new scene from a short text prompt, such as "on a wooden table, indoors, warm even light". Shopify suggests prompts of three to seven words, and mentioning size helps the product stay in scale.

Generated images come out at about 1 megapixel, which is fine for a lifestyle shot but smaller than the 2048 px you want for a zoomable main image. They also carry an invisible watermark that doesn't restrict commercial use. Keep your main image a real photo of the real product, and use generated scenes for secondary images or banners. For bigger creative jobs, Shopify's separate AI app is covered in our look at Tinker.

What the media editor can't do

Shopify's editor has no brightness, contrast, white balance or retouching controls. For those, use a photo editor before you upload. Free options that work well for store owners:

• Photopea runs in the browser, opens PSD files and has proper levels and curves.
• GIMP is a full desktop editor for detailed retouching.
• Canva is quickest for banners, social posts and anything with text on it.
• Pixlr handles quick brightness and crop fixes in the browser.

Your phone's own photo app is often enough for white balance and exposure. Whatever you use, edit a whole batch the same way so the photos match each other.

Product photography that needs less editing

The better the shoot, the less there is to fix later.

• Light. A large window with indirect daylight is the cheapest softbox there is. Turn off overhead lights so you don't mix warm and cool light, which is what makes whites look yellow or blue.
• Background. A sheet of white or light gray card curved up behind the product, so there's no visible horizon line.
• Steady camera. Use a tripod or prop the phone up, and use the timer. Keep the same distance and height for every product so they sit at the same size in the grid.
• Leave room. Shoot a little wider than you need, so you can crop to square later without cutting anything off.
• Shoot the set. Front, back, side, a detail or texture shot, the product in use, and one showing scale. Show every color you sell, and assign each variant its own image.
• Check color. Hold the product next to the screen. If a customer can't trust the color, expect returns.

If a photo will appear small in a collection grid, check it at that size. A detail that looks great full screen can turn into noise at 300 pixels wide.

Marketing photos: banners, slideshows and campaigns

Theme sections crop images to fit their shape. A banner that's wide on desktop can be tall on a phone, and a centered product can end up half off the screen. Three ways to control it:

1. Set a focal point. Click the image in the theme editor, Content → Files or a product's media, then click the part of the image that must stay visible, or drag the blue dot there, and click Save. The theme keeps that point in frame when it crops. Not every theme supports focal points, so check yours.
2. Crop close to the section's shape before you upload, so there's less for the theme to cut.
3. Use a large file. Shopify suggests high-resolution banner and slideshow images, up to 5000 × 5000 px, so they stay sharp on large screens. The CDN sends smaller versions to phones.

Keep text out of banner photos. Text baked into an image can't be read by search engines or screen readers, gets cropped on phones and has to be redrawn for every sale. Put it in the section's heading and button settings instead. And if you need more than one image on a collection page, see when one image per collection page isn't enough.

Shopify built-in vs other tools

Good photos take work, and they're easy to copy. If other sites keep lifting yours, we build Photolock, an app that makes it harder to right-click, drag or save the images on your store and can add a watermark to them (Photolock on the Shopify App Store). Our guide to what to do when someone copies your store covers the takedown side.

Troubleshooting product images

1. Images are different heights in the collection grid. The main images have different aspect ratios. Crop them all to one ratio, or use your theme's image ratio setting if it has one.
2. The upload fails. The file is over 20 MB or larger than 25 megapixels. Resize it first.
3. Zoom looks blurry. The original is too small. Re-export at around 2048 px on the long side.
4. A banner cuts off the product on mobile. Set a focal point on the image, or crop it closer to the section's shape.
5. Background removal leaves a halo. Correct the selection by hand in the editor, or shoot against a background that contrasts with the product's edges.
6. Colors look different on the site. Mixed lighting or an uncorrected white balance. Fix it in the editor before upload, not with the theme.
7. Pages load slowly. Large originals are fine; the CDN resizes them. Slowness usually comes from apps, videos or oversized theme settings. Our guide to speed on Shopify helps you find the cause.

Common questions

Can I edit product images directly in Shopify?

Yes. Click any image in a product's Media section to open the media editor. You can crop, resize, rotate, draw, remove or replace the background, and add alt text. There are no color or exposure controls.

What size should Shopify product images be?

For square images, 2048 × 2048 px usually displays best. The maximum is 5000 × 5000 px (25 megapixels) and 20 MB per file.

Is PNG or JPEG better for Shopify?

Shopify lists PNG as the best file type for most product images, followed by JPEG. Use PNG when you need transparency. Either way, Shopify serves a modern format to the shopper's browser.

Can I undo an edit in the Shopify media editor?

Yes. You can revert an image edited in the media editor back to the original, even after you've saved the changes.

Should I use AI-generated product photos?

For lifestyle scenes and banners, they can save a shoot. For the main product image, use a real photo. Customers buy what they see, and a generated scene shouldn't change the product itself.

Do I need to compress images before uploading?

No. Keep files under 20 MB and let Shopify's CDN handle resizing and formats. Compressing heavily before upload only lowers the quality of every version Shopify makes from it.

Next steps

Pick your ten best-selling products and check three things: every main image has the same ratio, every image has alt text, and every color variant has its own photo. That's an afternoon's work, and it's the part customers notice. If you'd like us to review your store's images alongside everything else, talk to us.