Product photos for Amazon and Etsy that pass review

Amazon and Etsy image requirements: what they have in common

Every marketplace writes its own image policy, and the wording changes from year to year, so the first job is to open the current page for each site you sell on and read it. That said, the policies overlap far more than they differ. If you prepare your photos to the strictest common denominator, the same files will work on Amazon, Etsy, eBay and most smaller marketplaces with only a change of crop.

What almost all of them ask for in the main image:

• A white or very light background. Amazon is the strictest: the main image must sit on pure white, which means a pixel value of 255, 255, 255, not the pale grey a phone produces when it photographs white card. Etsy does not force white, but its search grid and thumbnails reward a clean, light background because the product reads at a glance.
• The product fills most of the frame. A small object floating in the middle of a large white square looks like a low-effort listing and gives the zoom nothing to work with. Amazon states a fill ratio in its rules; other sites simply recommend the product be the clear subject.
• No text, logos, watermarks, badges or collages on the main image. Arrows, "bestseller" stickers, a shop logo in the corner and a grid of four colour variants are the classic reasons for a rejected or suppressed listing. Save those for the secondary images, where they are usually tolerated.
• Only what the buyer receives. Props that are not included (a vase next to the candle, a model's other jewellery) belong in lifestyle shots, not the main one.
• Enough resolution for zoom. Marketplaces that offer hover zoom or pinch zoom need a file with real detail at full size. Amazon enables zoom from 1000 px on the longest side; most sellers upload around 2000 px so the zoom shows texture rather than mush.

The honest warning here: the usual advice to "just shoot on white and brighten it" fails more often than it works. Pushing exposure until the background clips to white also burns out white or pale products, and the shadow under the item turns into a grey smudge that is neither natural nor clean. A proper cutout with the background replaced by exact white keeps the product's tones and gives you a background that passes an automated check. That is the job of a tool to remove the background from a photo, and the rest of this article is built around it.

The marketplace main image decides the click

In a search result, a buyer sees one image per listing, shrunk to a thumbnail a few centimetres wide on a phone. Title, price and reviews are read after the image has done its job of stopping the scroll. That is why the main image deserves more thought than the other six or eight photos put together.

Choosing the shot. Pick the angle that shows the product's shape in one look. For most objects that is a three-quarter view, slightly above, so the buyer sees the front and one side. Straight-on front views work for flat items (prints, phone cases, books). Clothing is usually shown flat-laid or on an invisible mannequin, depending on the category rules. Avoid dramatic angles, strong perspective from a wide lens close up, and crops that cut off part of the product: a missing handle or the top of a bottle makes people wonder what is being hidden.

Lighting. Soft, even light from a large source (a window with a sheet of tracing paper, or a softbox) with a white card on the opposite side to lift the shadows. Hard direct flash creates reflections on glossy surfaces that no cutout tool can remove, because the reflection is part of the product's pixels. If you are working with a phone, our article on product photos with a phone, a window and two sheets of card covers a setup that costs almost nothing.

A uniform margin. This is the detail that separates a shop that looks professional from one that looks improvised. When every main image in your catalogue has the product at the same scale, with the same white space around it, the search grid looks orderly and buyers can compare items side by side. A practical rule: decide on a square canvas (for example 2000 × 2000 px) and keep the product's longest dimension at roughly the same share of the canvas in every image, with equal space left and right. A mug and a teapot will not be identical in size on screen, but they will sit consistently, which is what the eye notices.

Uniform margins are far easier to achieve if the product is already isolated. Once the background is gone, centring and scaling becomes a crop decision rather than a reshoot, and you can use the same canvas size and padding for the whole batch.

Secondary images: detail, scale, use and the question everyone asks

The other slots in a listing are where you answer the buyer's doubts before they turn into questions or returns. Here the rules relax: lifestyle backgrounds, hands, rooms and short text callouts are generally accepted, although you should still check each marketplace's policy for the secondary images.

A sequence that works for most physical products:

1. Detail. A close-up of the material, stitching, finish or mechanism. This is where resolution matters most. If a detail crop from your camera is too small to show texture, you can upscale an image by ×2 before uploading, but shoot the detail properly whenever you can: upscaling sharpens what is there, it cannot invent a weave that the sensor never recorded.
2. Scale. The product next to an object everyone knows: a hand, a coin, a phone, an A4 sheet, a standard mug. Dimensions in the description are read by few people; a photo with a hand next to the item is understood instantly and cuts "smaller than expected" returns.
3. In use. The bag on a shoulder, the lamp switched on in a room, the print on a wall above a sofa. Here a background with atmosphere is fine and helps the buyer imagine the product at home.
4. The question everyone asks. Every product has one: the back of the necklace clasp, the inside of the bag, the plug type, the label with the ingredients, the bottom of the ceramic piece. Read your messages and reviews, or those of similar listings, and give that answer a photo of its own.
5. Variants. If the product comes in several colours, either one photo per colour or one clean group shot, depending on how the marketplace handles variations.

On Etsy, where shops often sell handmade or vintage items, the secondary images carry even more weight because buyers want proof of the making and the condition. A photo of a flaw on a vintage piece, clearly shown, builds more trust than a perfect but vague set.

If an otherwise good lifestyle shot has something distracting in the background (a cable, a price label, a stray object on the table), you can remove an object from a photo by painting a mask over it in the browser rather than reshooting the scene.

A white background for selling online: workflow for a batch of twenty

Most sellers do not photograph one product; they photograph a collection, a new season or a restock. Doing twenty products one at a time, each with its own improvised setup, is how a catalogue ends up inconsistent. This workflow keeps the batch uniform and avoids redoing work.

1. Fix the setup before the first shot. Camera or phone on a tripod, at the same height and distance for every product of similar size. Mark the product's position on the table with a small piece of tape. Use the same focal length (on a phone, the same lens, and no digital zoom) so perspective does not change between items. Switch off mixed light: daylight plus a warm ceiling bulb gives two colours of shadow that are hard to correct later.

2. Shoot with space around the product. Leave a generous margin in the frame. You will crop to your square canvas later, and a product that touches the edge of the photo cannot be centred with even padding. Shoot at the highest quality your camera allows; a HEIC file from an iPhone is fine, there is no need to convert it first.

3. Cut out the background for the main image. Run each main shot through the background remover and export it on exact white as a JPG. This is the file that goes in the first slot on Amazon, and it also works as the first photo on Etsy and eBay.

4. Keep a transparent PNG as a master, saved apart. From the same cutout, export a version with a transparent background and keep it in a separate folder (for example masters). You will reuse it again and again: coloured backgrounds for a seasonal campaign, ad creatives, social posts, a composite for a bundle, a banner for your shop. Re-cutting the product each time wastes time and gives slightly different edges each time.

5. Compress at the very end. Only once everything is cropped and final, compress the files you will upload. Compressing earlier means every later edit recompresses an already compressed JPEG, and artefacts pile up around the edges of the product, exactly where the zoom looks. Do not compress the transparent masters: keep them as full-quality PNG.

6. Name files sensibly. Something like sku-01-main.jpg, sku-01-detail.jpg, sku-01-scale.jpg. It sounds trivial, but with twenty products and six photos each, you have 120 files, and uploading the wrong colour variant to a listing is an easy mistake.

An honest limit on step 3: cutout tools struggle with clear glass, transparent plastic, fine mesh and very thin wire, because the "background" is visible through the product itself. For those items, shoot on a real white sweep with good backlighting and use the cutout only to clean the edges, or accept the photograph as it comes from the camera. And a matte white product on a white background needs some contrast at the time of shooting (a light grey card behind it), otherwise neither a person nor a model can tell where the edge is. For more on edge cases, see the guide to removing the background from an image.

Step by step in Airpic: remove the background, then compress

Here is the exact process for one product, which you then repeat for the batch. No account is needed, and processing and seeing the result is free.

Part 1: the cutout.

1. Open the background remover and drop in your photo. JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, HEIC and AVIF are accepted; the EXIF orientation from your phone is applied automatically, so a portrait shot will not arrive sideways, and the colour profile (ICC) is preserved.
2. Choose the background. For the marketplace main image, pick white. For the master file, pick transparent. You can also set black or any colour in hexadecimal (for instance a brand colour for an ad), but white and transparent cover what a marketplace listing needs.
3. Choose the output format. For the white version, JPG keeps the file small and is what every marketplace accepts. For the transparent master, PNG, because JPG cannot store transparency.
4. Process and check the preview in the comparison slider. Look closely at the hardest edges: hair on a plush toy, fringe on a scarf, the gap inside a handle. The edges are calculated at full resolution, including fine hair, without the light halo that cheaper cutouts leave around the product. In our tests on 19 September 2026, a 1600 × 1200 px photo was cut out, hair included, in 5 seconds.
5. Download. The first full download each month is free; after that, downloads use credits that do not expire, with no subscription. The current cost is shown on the tool's page.

Part 2: compression for a fast listing page.

1. Open the tool to compress images and load the white-background JPG. Compression is free, including the download, and runs in a few seconds.
2. Set the maximum side to the size you settled on for your catalogue, for example 2000 px. That leaves enough for marketplace zoom without uploading a 6000 px camera original that the site will resize anyway.
3. Keep the format as JPEG for marketplace uploads; they all accept it. Move the quality slider to around 85 and compare: below that, banding can start to appear in smooth gradients and on white backgrounds. If a site imposes a file size limit, use the target size in KB option instead and let the tool find the quality.
4. Tick remove metadata. This strips camera data, date and GPS location (useful if you photograph at home) while keeping the ICC colour profile, so the product's colours do not shift.
5. Download and upload to the listing. For your own shop website, WebP or AVIF from the same tool will produce lighter files; the guide to compressing images for the web explains when each one is worth using.

Your files are deleted one hour after download, and after one day at most if you never download them. They are never used to train models, and processing runs on GPUs in the European Union. When you are ready, start with your best-selling product: remove the background from a photo and check the result before you commit to the whole batch.

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