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Best practices for your product pictures

by Dufa Staff | 24 August 2020

 

This is a guide discusses the importance of good product images and helps you follow the best practices to upload product images which can boost your online sales & drive traffic.

Importance of Images:

  • Images represent your product’s perceived value and quality.
  • Images play a vital role in an online shopper’s decision to buy a product. 
  • Images speak directly to your audience, making your product page and content relatable and bringing out an emotional response from the customer. Hence, you need to make sure you have images that show your product in the most flattering way possible.
  • Products with accurate, clear, suitable photos show higher conversion rates, draw more interest from users, and get more social media shares than products with low-resolution photos (or no product photos at all). People love the visual capabilities of online shopping. Give them what they’re looking for.

Plan your images:

Decide what kind of product images will best serve your goals i.e. images in a standard setting or context settings. We at Dufa encourage context/lifestyle setting so long as your image can clearly communicate what exactly you are selling.

  • Standard Photography: Standard product photography shows your merchandise in a neutral setting – plain backdrops (gray) , diffused lighting, no other objects in the frame. The focus is only the product you are selling.
  • Lifestyle/Context Photography: Lifestyle product photography shows your products in a context or setup where people actually use the products. Lifestyle product photography can include people or just show a setup example a rug is shown in a living room setup. Make sure your products are in a context that mimics what they’d look like in real life.

For some products, you can do a mix of lifestyle and standard photography so you can sure the customers how the product looks as well as also show them the context.

Props and Backgrounds:

Using a background sweep can really reduce your work editing pictures.

  • Context Backgrounds: We at Dufa encourage artistically shot photos, with a good layout and context. Show off your creativity skills not only creating a product but also creating that context setting & working with the visual appeal. For an artistic setup, keep some props such a throw, a linen cloth, or a wooden plank to get the best pictures. This makes your product catch attention & is in sync with what Dufa stands for – celebrating creativity in every form. Enjoy the art of photography, experiment & learn something new each day and yes, let your product shine!
  • Plain Backgrounds: For standard photography, we recommend light gray backgrounds or sweeps as opposed to white backgrounds. We have tried couple of permutations and with the colors on our website, pictures look great on lighter gray backgrounds. There are a couple of amazing software tools such as Canva where you can remove the background and apply a standard background for your images. Whatever shade of gray you choose, just keep it consistent.

Keep your brand in mind:

The image including backgrounds, subject focus, quality, context, color theme, filters and saturation should have a uniformity that resonates with your target customers and reflects what your brand always stands for.

Quality and Resolution:

Quality is of great importance. Hence, make sure you have crisp high-quality images for all your products with good lighting and resolution.

Capture products from every Angle:

You have the provision to add 5 pictures per product and you must try to make the most by taking shots in different angles:

  • A shot covering the entire product – which should be used as thumbnail. A thumbnail is the picture that appears on different pages. This should be the best picture showing the entire product (standard/context)
  • A close-up shot – customers would love to know what your product looks like in closeup, the material and colors.
  • A shot to show the measurement of the item – a chart or an image with sizes and measurements is extremely helpful to online customers.
  • A shot taken from side views/far angles - such as a side shot or far shot gives better perspective. Also, if you have the product available in different color variations or tints then its best to show a picture of the variations so customers know the actual colors and tints.
  • A body shot for wearable items - or a context shop for home & living and artwork also gives the customer a clear idea of what they are purchasing.

Capture all variations:

If you have products in different variations such as color or tints, make sure you show at least 1 image with the correct color of the variations. To make sure your products aren’t returned due to not uploading the right variation images, you always need to ensure that your customer has no doubt or ambiguity while purchasing a product.

Optimizing size of your Images:

Make sure your images aren’t too large. But do not compress it so much that it loses it’s quality. Larger images take more data and more time to load. This can annoy online shoppers and results in abandoning their search on slow loading pages. The average attention span of online shopper is 3 secs where in if the image/page load is not complete, they may lose interest. Hence, bear the size in mind before uploading. Typically, each image should not be more than 200-250 KB in size.

Optimizing your Images for Search:

To help your product come up in organic search results, you can take care of a few basic things to optimize your product images:

  • File names: Image files should be named per the product which could be the product title. This will help Google understand what’s in your images, which will help it know when to show them to searchers.

Example: Name your file as ‘Yellow Topaz and White Gold Dangler Earring.jpg’ rather than ‘IMG6755.jpg’

  • Alt tags: Every product image on your site should have an alt tag. Alt tags are what screen readers display in place of images, so they’re key for accessibility. Dufa takes care of Alt tags using the File names you upload.
  • Captions: Captions may not make sense on product pages, but if you’re showing product images in blog posts, roundups, etc., captions help Google make sense of your images and serve them in relevant searches.

Consistency:

Even though every product image may be different, it’s important that you maintain a consistent style and design for each photo. Especially, make sure all your thumbnail images use the same background, modeling, focus, lighting, quality, alignment, orientation, and image placement strategy, throughout your store page.  Consistency provides a comfortable and professional feeling. Inconsistency can be distracting.

 

Related Articles:

Step by step guide to listing products

Guide to lighting and equipment

Basic guide to product photography

Tips to shoot and edit videos for your story or products