Phone photographs are good enough for most small stores when they are consistent: soft daylight, a plain background, the same angles every time, and files resized for the store before upload.

A shop that looks like a garage sale

A small online store has sixty products, photographed over two years on whichever phone was handy.

Some were taken on the kitchen table at night under yellow bulbs, some outside in bright sun, a few on a wooden bench and a few on a bedsheet. Each was uploaded straight from the camera roll.

None of the photographs is terrible on its own. Side by side in the category grid, they make the shop look like a garage sale.

The camera is rarely the problem. A phone bought in the last few years takes photographs good enough for any store page; what it cannot fix is light, background and angle that change every time.

Why consistency matters more than the camera

Shoppers meet your products in a grid, a dozen at a time, before they open any of them.

When every image has the same background, light and framing, the eye compares the products. When every image is different, the eye compares the photographs, and the shop looks improvised.

Colour is the costly part. A mug photographed under warm bulbs looks orange; the same mug by a window looks blue-grey. A customer who buys one colour and receives another is a return waiting to happen.

Consistency also says something about the business. A store whose photographs match looks carefully run, which is what a stranger about to enter card details wants to believe.

The setup that costs almost nothing

The last is the one most often missed. A phone lives in a pocket, and a thumbprint on the lens gives the soft, hazy look people blame on the camera.

Light first

Daylight from a large window, out of direct sun, is the best free light there is. An overcast day is better still, because the light is soft and even.

Turn the room lights off. Bulbs and daylight have different colours, and mixing them gives one side of the product a warm cast and the other a cool one that no editing removes cleanly.

Leave the flash off as well. It flattens texture and puts a hard reflection on anything glazed, polished or wrapped.

Shoot at roughly the same time of day for every session, so next month's photographs match this month's.

The same angles for every product

Decide the set once and use it for everything: usually a straight front view, a side or back, a close detail of the material, and one showing scale, in a hand or beside something familiar.

Keep the phone at the same height and distance each time, which is what the tape marks are for.

Move closer rather than zooming in. Unless the phone has a separate telephoto lens, zoom simply crops and enlarges the picture, throwing detail away.

Skip the filters and the portrait mode. Filters change the colour customers are buying, and the background blur often cuts into the edges of objects in ways that look odd up close.

A worked example

A potter on Vancouver Island sells mugs, bowls and planters through a small online store, alongside summer markets.

The photographs had been taken wherever the light happened to be, and the same glaze looked green on one product page and grey on the next. Customers emailed to ask what colour a piece really was.

The fix took two weekends. A table went beside a north-facing window, with a curved sheet of white card behind it and tape marks for four fixed angles.

Every piece in stock was reshot in the same morning light, and each image was cropped square and checked on screen against the pot itself.

The descriptions gained a line explaining that glazes vary from piece to piece, which the photographs now show honestly.

Editing without changing the product

Editing is for consistency, not decoration.

Crop every image to the same shape, usually square, so the grid lines up. Straighten anything that leans, and leave a similar margin around each product.

Adjust brightness until the background reads as white rather than grey, and correct the colour until the product on screen matches the one on the table. Check the result on a phone.

Sized for the store, not the camera

A photograph straight from a current phone is around four thousand pixels wide and several megabytes in size. No product page displays anything like that.

Uploaded as it is, every category page becomes a heavy download, and on mobile data the grid fills in slowly, one picture at a time.

Resize before uploading. Around two thousand pixels on the longest side leaves room for zoom on most stores, and sensible compression brings each file down to a few hundred kilobytes.

Rename the files while you are at it. A name like blue-glazed-mug-front.jpg is easier to find later than the camera's own numbering, and it tells search engines what the picture shows.

Writing the setup down

The setup works only if it can be repeated, possibly by somebody else, possibly next year.

Take a photograph of the setup itself: the table, the card, the window, the tape marks. Add a few lines listing the angles, the crop and the export size.

Keep it with the store's records, so the next session starts from the same place, whoever holds the phone.

The counter-case

Some products are hard to photograph well on any phone.

Jewellery, glass and polished metal reflect everything around them, and very small items need lenses and lighting that phones do not have. A professional photographer is worth it there.

The home page and banner images, which carry the first impression, also benefit from a professional session, even when the everyday catalogue is shot in-house.

For most of the catalogue in most small stores, though, consistent phone photographs are enough: the same light, the same background, the same angles and properly sized files.

Before the next product goes up

  1. Wipe the lens before every session.
  2. Shoot by a window with the room lights off.
  3. Use the same background every time.
  4. Take the same four angles for each product.
  5. Crop every image to one shape.
  6. Resize and rename before uploading.
  7. Photograph the setup and write it down.

Step seven is what keeps the store consistent next year, when the card has been put away and the person taking photographs may be somebody new.

Serving those images in a lighter format to the browsers that support it is covered in WebP works in Firefox now.

Frequently asked questions

Is a phone camera good enough for product photos?

For most small stores, yes. Current phones are capable at the sizes a store displays; what lets photographs down is inconsistent light, mixed backgrounds and changing angles.

What light should I use?

Indirect daylight from a window, with the room lights and the flash off. Mixing daylight with warm bulbs gives colour casts, and direct sun produces hard shadows and glare.

What background works best?

A plain white or pale grey card curved up behind the product, so there is no visible line where the table ends. Use the same one for every product.

Which angles should every product have?

The same set for everything: usually a front view, a side or back, a close detail and one showing scale, all taken from the same height and distance.

Why resize photos before uploading them?

Straight from a phone, each file is several megabytes and far wider than any store displays. Resized and compressed, it loads quickly on mobile data and still allows zoom.

When is a professional photographer worth it?

For reflective or very small items such as jewellery and glass, and for the home page and banner images, where one photograph carries the whole first impression.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Product photos that all look different?

Send us your store address. We will tell you which images to reshoot first and how to size them.

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