How to Prepare Product Photos for an Online Shop
Good product photos for an online shop don't need a studio. What they need is consistency: every item on a clean background, every photo the same shape, and every file small enough to load quickly. When a shopper scrolls a collection page and the pictures line up neatly, the shop looks organised and trustworthy, even if the photos were taken on a kitchen table.
A routine that works for most small shops is three steps: remove the background, crop each photo to the same square, then compress it. You can do all three in your browser with KhanTools, and the photos never leave your device.
Before you edit: take a photo the tools can work with
Editing can't fix a blurry or badly lit photo, so a few minutes at the shooting stage saves a lot of frustration later.
- Use daylight. Set the product near a window, out of direct sun. Soft side light shows texture without harsh shadows.
- Choose a background that contrasts with the product. A dark bag on a light wall, or a white mug on a dark cloth. Background removal works far better when the subject clearly stands out.
- One product per photo. A single item is easier to cut out cleanly than a group on a busy table.
- Leave space around the item. You'll crop later, so don't frame it so tightly that an edge is cut off.
- Keep the camera at the same height and distance for every product in a range, so they look the same size on the page.
Step 1: Remove the background
A plain background puts all the attention on the product and makes a set of photos look like they belong together. Our Background Remover cuts the background out and gives you a PNG with a transparent background. "Transparent" means those areas are see-through, so you can later place the item on white, a brand colour, or anything else.
- Open Background Remover and click Upload an image. JPG, PNG and WebP all work.
- Click Remove Background and wait for the progress bar.
- Check the Result panel. The grey and white checkerboard shows where the image is transparent. It won't appear in the file.
- Click Download PNG. The file is saved with
-no-bg added to its name.
The first run can take a while because your browser downloads the AI model, which can be tens of megabytes. If you're on mobile data, wait for Wi-Fi. Later runs are usually much faster because the files are cached. The model runs on your own device, which is handy if you're photographing products that haven't been announced yet.
Be realistic about tricky items. There are no manual brushes, so fur, loose threads, glass and see-through fabric may come out patchy. For those products, a photo on a plain white sheet with good light may look better than a cut-out.
The tool doesn't add a white background for you. To get a white background, place the transparent PNG on a white canvas in your design app or your shop's image editor.
Step 2: Crop every photo to the same square
Square photos are a common choice for shops because they line up neatly in grids. Shopify, for example, says square images at 2048×2048 pixels usually look best, and that images shown side by side on collection pages need the same aspect ratio to display at the same size. "Aspect ratio" is just the shape of the picture: 1:1 is a square, 16:9 is a wide rectangle.
- Open Image Crop and upload your photo.
- Pick 1:1 in the Ratio bar.
- Move and resize the box so the product fills most of the square, with a similar margin on each side.
- Choose a format. PNG keeps transparency. JPEG is smaller but turns transparent areas into a solid colour. WebP is small and keeps transparency, if your shop accepts it.
- Click Download Cropped Image. You'll get your original name plus
-cropped.
Try to give each product the same amount of empty space around it. If one mug fills the square and the next one floats in the middle, the page looks uneven even though every photo is square.
Cropping only removes pixels, so the final size depends on how big your crop box is on the original. Start from a full-size photo rather than a screenshot or a photo you've already shrunk, especially if you want shoppers to be able to zoom in.
Step 3: Shrink the file
Large images slow down your pages, and PNG cut-outs in particular can be big files. Image Compress reduces the file size and can convert the format.
- Open Image Compress and upload your cropped photo.
- Choose a format. WebP usually gives a smaller file than JPEG and keeps transparency. JPEG is accepted almost everywhere, but any see-through areas become white.
- Leave Quality at 80% to start. For most photos you won't see a difference.
- Type a number in Max width if the image is bigger than you need. Height scales to match, so nothing stretches.
- Check the size boxes, then click Download.
If the Saved box turns red, the new file is bigger than the old one. Lower the quality or switch format. Always compress from your original or cropped file, not from one you've already compressed, because each round of JPEG compression loses a bit more detail.
How big should the final image be? Check your shop platform's own guidance. Shopify accepts images up to 5000×5000 pixels and under 20 MB, and recommends 2048×2048 for square photos. Other platforms and marketplaces have their own rules, and some marketplaces have specific requirements for the main image, so read their seller help pages before you shoot a whole range.
Keep the set consistent
- Name files clearly, such as
blue-mug-front.webp and blue-mug-side.webp, so you can find them later and upload them in order.
- Shoot the same angles for every product: front, side, a detail, and one showing scale (the item in a hand or next to a familiar object).
- Keep your untouched originals in a separate folder. If you change your shop layout later, you can crop again from the full-size photo.
If your shop platform has its own background removal or image editing built in, it may be quicker to use that for a large catalogue, since our tools work one image at a time. For a handful of new listings, the three-step routine above gets you tidy, matching photos in a few minutes each.
KhanTools — Free Online Web Tools
Free browser-based tools for images and PDFs. No uploads. 100% private.
Blog ·
About ·
Privacy Policy ·
Terms of Service ·
Contact
JavaScript is required to use KhanTools. Please enable JavaScript in your browser.