Prepare product photos for an online shop

Marketplace grids punish lazy preparation: a wide snapshot letterboxed into a square tile, a ten-megabyte file that stalls an upload, or two products that look unrelated because one was shot slightly cooler than the other. This job is the sequence sellers actually follow, using four small browser tools in a deliberate order. Decide the tile shape first, frame the subject, scale to the grid, then reduce weight last, because squeezing bytes before resizing softens detail you meant to keep. Every step runs on your own machine, so unreleased stock never crosses the network and you can iterate without a quota. Reuse one framing rule across the catalogue so the shopfront reads as a single set. Keep an untouched master at full resolution and export only the marketplace copy. Two details separate a passable listing from a polished one, and neither is expensive. The first is consistency: shoot from the same distance, keep the light falling from the same direction, and a grid stops looking improvised. The second is restraint, because over-sharpening, aggressive saturation and heavy noise reduction all read as damage on a thumbnail. Stop as soon as a picture looks clean at the size a shopper actually sees. When a marketplace wants several ratios, derive them from the same master rather than re-cropping an exported copy, and reserve the widest frame for a banner. Name each export clearly so a later upload never confuses the square search image with the story tile. Before publishing, open the storefront on a phone: the real test is whether two adjacent listings look like siblings, not whether one photograph is beautiful in isolation. Colour is where a catalogue most often drifts. Two photographs of the same timber can look like different materials when one was shot under tungsten light and the other beside a window, so standardise the lighting before the crop. A neutral grey card in the first frame gives a reference, and consistency matters more than absolute accuracy. Resist lifting saturation to make a dull shot pop; buyers compare, and an exaggerated tile sets an expectation the parcel cannot meet.