A catalogue that looks shot in one session

How it works

1. 1

   Export what you have

   Start with the product photos already in the store.

2. 2

   Standardise in bulk

   Remove backgrounds and place everything on the same field at the same crop.

3. 3

   Re-upload

   Publish white-background versions; keep transparent ones for marketing.

Collection pages are read as a grid

A customer landing on a collection page takes in the whole grid before any single product. One image with a grey background among nine white ones is more damaging than all ten being slightly soft, because the inconsistency is what the eye catches.

The two things to standardise are the background and the amount of padding around the product. Same background, roughly the same proportion of empty space on every side, and a catalogue assembled over a year starts to look deliberate.

Keep transparent masters, publish white

For the store itself, a white background is the safer default: it looks correct on every theme regardless of the theme's own background colour.

Transparent versions become valuable the moment you reuse a product image anywhere else — a homepage banner, an email, a paid ad, a collection tile with a coloured background. You can always flatten a transparent image onto white; you cannot recover transparency from one already flattened.

Producing both from the same cutout costs nothing extra and saves editing the same product twice.

Where the time actually goes

Removing the background from one product is trivial. Removing it from three hundred is where a small team loses a week, which is why catalogues end up half-finished with the newest products looking different from the oldest.

Batch processing is what makes standardising an existing catalogue realistic rather than a project that gets postponed indefinitely.

Keep exploring