When product photography is worth the effort

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Product photography is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

When it is worth it

Consistent lighting and background make a catalogue look professional. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How to decide

One excellent photo beats six mediocre angles. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

In practice

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
• One excellent photo beats six mediocre angles — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.