0 A Concise Guide: Product Images

Author: Piers Parker
11th May, 2007

If you are not lucky enough to have a supplier who has given you a CD with all the product images your require ready for the web, this guide will help you achieve the best results.

Basic rule of thumb

• Product image should ideally be on a white background.
• Thumbnail images (small picture) should be between 70 pixel square and 150 pixels square.
• Expanded images (large picture) should be big, big enough to see the product well, 400 pixels square should suffice.
• Product image should be 72 dpi resolution.
• Product image should be in RGB mode.
• Product image should be saved as JPEG (.jpg) format for best quality.
• Image names should be lowercase with no spaces, even better the image name should be the product code e.g. product-name.jpg or 123abc.jpg.
• To distiguish between the Thumbnail and the Expanded image we suggest you use the following naming convension e.g. product-name-thumb.jpg and product-name-exp.jpg

Taking the pictures
If you have a good quality digital camera you can take the pictures yourself. If your products are small it might be worth investing in a Light Tent (Desktop Studio) for around £40, which can improve the quality of your pictures for relatively little expense.

While the general rule of thumb is that product images should be on white backgrounds, better results can sometimes be had by taking a photo of the product in action, i.e. lifestyle shots.

Manipulating Images
There are many software applications on the market that allow you to resize and crop your images, ranging from Photoshop (and their popular cut-down version Photoshop Elements) and Paint Shop Pro to the popular (and free) Gimp and Paint.NET.

Batch Processing of Images
The painstaking task of creating thumbnail images for 1000’s of product can be eased with batch processing. Batch processing tools come built in to applications such as Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. If your image maniplutaion software does not have batch processing, you could use a free program called (kd). Simply select the images you want to create thumbnails for, select the compression and give the image name a suffix (e.g. -thumb) and start the process.

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