How to get product photography right
We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. The short answer to product photography is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
The reason this keeps coming up
Consistent lighting and background make a catalogue look professional. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Scale shots prevent returns from size surprises
- One excellent photo beats six mediocre angles
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
One excellent photo beats six mediocre angles. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
A reasonable first step
How to tell if yours is fine
In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Three things worth confirming about product photography before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Scale shots prevent returns from size surprises — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.