Professional product photos sell products online
We have all been to online shops that have a limited number of poor images that don't help sell the product. Often they are the same as every business selling those products. Sometimes there is only one grainy image that doesn't properly show the product.
And guess what? Those products don't sell! Especially if the product copy is poor too (see our other blog post about Writing great product copy) . The potential buyer leaves the site and buys elsewhere.
Help make your business and your products look more professional by using great looking images.
A recent post on the Shopify blog detailed how to take your own professional product photos:
The Ultimate DIY Guide to Beautiful Product Photography
The guide shows how simple it is to create your own great product photos using everyday equipment.
A couple of things not covered by the article that are also really important are:
1. Give your product images good names
Search engines have no idea what an image is file names like IMG1234.jpg doesn't help!
At Ascend 7 we like to ensure product images are names using a standard naming convention:
- Be just letters, numbers, underscores and dashes with an extension
- Describe what the image is of, i.e. Isabella-sandal-side-view-small-jpg
- Be unique. Each images needs to have a different name
Also, if you have lots of similar products, poor names like IMG1234.jpg allow the wrong images to be used for the wrong products and that makes more work explaining to prospective customers trying to work out what they want and unhappy customers who got the wrong product!
2. Add usage or size descriptors in the filename
When you have professional product images you want to use them in different places. Try to keep the original file in as high a resolution as possible and make copies that are specific for different uses.
Some online systems need images uploaded that are certain sizes. Sometimes there is a large image, a medium image and a smaller image. Use a standard way of naming the size of the image like shown above with Isabella-sandal-side-view-small-jpg. This will help you heaps and save lots of time.
3. Group the images in folders related to the catalogue, section or even product
More than couple of dozen images in one folder can make it hard to find what you are looking for at a later date. Either use file tagging or folders to group images and make it easier to find them later on.
4. Compress the base folder and share using online file sharing tools like Google Drive, DropBox and OneDrive.
Cloud file storage areas almost all have a sharing function that allows sharing of specific files. Upload your compressed images and share them with whoever needs to upload them to your online shop.
Ascend 7 Product Photography
If all this seems too hard or you don't have enough time, speak to us about our in-house product photography service. Remember, great photos sell products!
