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In today’s ecommerce dominated world, streamlining your photography process is the key to getting your products to your customers as quickly as possible.

If you follow this six-step guide to optimizing your product photography, you too can shoot like fast fashion on a budget that makes sense.

Have the following questions ever left you scratching your head?

• Why is it that when I do a Google image search, my product photos never show up?
• Do I need to add alt attributes to my images?
• What's the difference between JPEG, GIF and PNG? When should I use one over another?

Today you’ll finally have answers because we’re diving deep into these questions and more.

Today's Ask Shopify tackles a question that we're sure a lot of people have asked at one point or another in their ecommerce journey: is it better to DIY my store's design, or hire a pro to do it?

And sure, there's no one right answer for everyone (we love our pros and our DIY-ers equally!) but if you're worried that you don't have the skills to tackle your store's design yourself, listen up.

You definitely do, according to the entrepreneurs we talked to.

Before you buy something in a brick and mortar store, you interact with it. You test drive cars, you touch blankets, you smell candles.

In ecommerce, that interactivity is missing, which puts a lot of pressure on product photos to fill the void.

Fortunately, your brain can process images in as little as 13 milliseconds. It can remember more than 2,000 images with 90% accuracy over the span of a week.

So, product photography can be used to persuade, influence, motivate, and direct attention. Product photos are lean, mean selling machines and they deserve your undivided attention.

Checking your Instagram or Facebook feed, you’re almost certain to see a constant barrage of food pictures scrolling by like images in a slot machine.

Food photography is an almost daily activity for many people. But if you're looking to get serious about your food photos, these tips will make the difference between pictures that are "good enough for Instagram" and ones that people can almost taste through their screens.

When does a sneaker become more than a sneaker? What makes a consumer choose one seemingly identical gown or coat or swimsuit over another? Emotion. Branding at its best, speaks to its intended audience like a BFF – it, like, really gets you. And in fashion, it stands up for you, becoming the outward-facing expression of your personality.

For small brands and emerging designers, widespread logo recognition is an unattainable (or at least very far-away) goal. But branding is more than a logo. It encompasses values, voice, and design choices that run like a continuous thread through product and packaging and online presence. Good branding is storytelling – a consistent and continuous message, weaving meaning into every piece.

How do your nail branding for your own fashion brand? 14 experts weighed in on the discussion.

Businesses have gone online and, in the process, have also made themselves susceptible to duplicity and identity theft on an unprecedented scale.

Now, fraudsters can recreate entire websites that look just like your own, and may even create social media pages claiming to be the voice of your brand. The worst part? If done right, consumers cannot tell the difference.

Here are some ways you can protect your brand from identity theft online.

"You’re not just selling a product. You’re selling a lifestyle."

If you sell any kind of aspirational lifestyle product, those words probably ring true. Whether it’s clothing, cosmetics, footwear, or furniture, you know that just showing customers a photo of your product isn’t always enough.

Enter the lookbook. Unlike product and catalog pages, which typically display products in an unadorned, utilitarian state, lookbooks provide context, presenting them in a real-life, visually-appealing setting.

Today's post will dig into how you can create a lookbook for your Shopify store.

Removing an image’s background has a wealth of benefits including easy integration across sales channels, increased attention on your product, and improved page loading speed. But you might not know how to do it yourself.

If you’re handling your store's design tasks, there may be more background removal options at your disposal than you realize. Sure, there’s Photoshop, but it’s not the only option. There are less complex, lower cost, and more scalable alternatives available.

Let’s take a look at the four best options for removing the background of product photos for your online store.

If you want to create repeat business and minimize returns, you need to color correct (aka “color grade”) your product images to represent your product as accurately as possible and match your chosen ecommerce color palette.

No matter how careful you are or how beautiful your shot, there are always improvements that can be made in post-production.

Color correcting isn’t a complex task. It can be done fairly easily provided you have the right software—like Adobe Lightroom—and you integrate it into your product photography workflow. 

Read more to learn how.