Shopify Image Sizes: A 2025 Guide for Product Images (With Tips)

Setting up your Shopify store from scratch is a big task, which can feel intimidating and leave you with a lot of questions — what size should your product images be? What image formats should I use?

Understanding Shopify image sizes for a newbie can be even more daunting.

To ease your setup into the Shopify platform, our team at Commerce3D has compiled the ultimate Shopify image size guide for all your product image-related questions and Shopify’s best practices that you can use in your store to drive those sales up!

Product images are the first thing your customer sees when they enter your store. Shopify image sizes have a direct impact on how your products and your brand overall are perceived by your potential customers. MIT study reveals just how critical these initial moments are: the human brain processes visual information in a just13 milliseconds. This means your customers form their first impression about your brand's quality and your product's value in less time than it takes to blink.

There are numerous factors to take into account when preparing and uploading content to your website, ranging from file sizes and aspect ratios to the image-uploading process itself.

Let’s delve into these details:

You may have a great product, however, if the photography is badly composed or of poor quality, down goes the perception of your product’s value and with it the purchase probability. In such cases, consumers are likely to leave your ecommerce store for a competitor offering higher quality content, showing off materials, colors, or any other criteria that appeal to them.

Another research shows that a psychological sense of ownership is boosted with vivid and detailed imagery, therefore, the size and quality of your product photos matter greatly and can be the determining factor whether a potential customer clicks on or abandons your page.

In your Shopify store, incorporating high-resolution images that retain their quality while zooming is crucial. Images that are too small or excessively large will appear distorted when zoomed in, detracting from the customer’s experience.

It’s imperative to use the right Shopify image sizes that are optimized for zoom functionality, allowing customers to view product details without any loss in image quality.

Slow-loading pages are a big no-no in today's fast-paced digital world.

A common cause of sluggish website performance is the presence of large media files, including extensive product photos and videos. But the answer isn't just making images smaller or compressing them a lot. You need to find a good balance: your Shopify photo sizes should consider clarity for close-up views, but also be adjusted so your website loads fast.

We won’t set any strict limitations to your Shopify image sizes since it really depends on your product, picture quality, colors used, compression, etc.

But, here is the ultimate Shopify image size guide and best practices you should keep in mind when dealing with product photos for your store:

Images that are too heavy take up a lot of precious weight on your page and can cause a long ‘...loading’ experience for your customers. Compressing your product images is one of the most effective ways to speed up the loading of your website. However, not all image compressors are created equal. Try using a compressor that can reduce file size while maintaining photo resolution. Some free web tools like CompressPNG or TinyPNG do a good job and typically allow you to reduce numerous images at once.

For Shopify, you should aim to use images that weigh from 2-5 KBs to 3.4-3.7 MB.

The style of your Shopify page will affect how people perceive your brand. Your page style should reflect the nature of your brand and products: bright and fresh? Trendy and minimalistic? Dark and mysterious? Knowing which type of personality fits your branding best is the key to making sure that every piece of content ties in with the others.

Shopify supports the following file types: JPG, PNG, WEBP, GIF, and TIFF.
Here’s your Shopify image size guide to figure out when to use which:

JPG (Joint Photographic Group) is commonly used for images on the web. The JPG format is a popular choice for product images because it strikes a balance between file size and image quality. The compression enables this balance, which is important when uploading images to the web.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is also a widely spread format since PNG files have “lossless'' (reduced file size without reduced quality) compression and support transparency (images with transparent backgrounds).

WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web, with an average saving of over 30% of file size when compared to JPG or PNG.

GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) are a great way to add some animation to your store. For Shopify, it is recommended to upload the file to a GIF-making tool (Giphy, for example), get the embed code, and paste it into your Shopify product page.

TIFF is a lossless compression format that is widely supported by a range of editing and web applications. It offers high-quality, uncompressed graphics, which tend to have large file sizes.

HEIC is a modern, efficient compression format. It offers high-quality images at smaller file sizes compared to traditional formats like JPEG. When using HEIC, it's important to ensure that your target audience's devices and browsers are compatible with this format, as incompatibility can lead to issues in viewing or downloading these images.

Overall, JPG is certainly the most common and convenient file format for product images when it comes to associating smaller sizes with decent quality. PNG stands for higher quality lossless compression, it does so at the heavy cost of a larger file size. GIF is useful for demonstrating 360-degree virtual photographs and provides lightweight files. TIFF is a format that offers great quality, but file sizes are usually rather heavy.

Now let’s take a deeper look at the size guidelines for specific types of images on Shopify, including product images, blog images, collections, background images, hero images, slideshows, banners, and logos.

When you're ready to upload product images to your Shopify store, follow Shopify's image guidelines to ensure a seamless experience. This means your images can be as large as 4472 x 4472 px, or 20 megapixels, and smaller 20 MB. For those opting for square photos, Shopify recommends 2048 x 2048 px. For Aspect ratio can vary: 1:1 for square images or 3:1 for rectangular photos.

Shopify collection image size specifications follow the same guidelines as product images: they can be any size up to 4472 x 4472 px, or 20 megapixels, while staying smaller than 20 MB in file size. For optimal display across all devices, Shopify recommends 2048 x 2048 px for square collection images.

When selecting or creating background images for your Shopify store, prioritize simplicity and clarity to ensure your visuals enhance rather than overwhelm your customer's browsing experience. For optimal results, your background images can be as large as 2500 x 1406 pixels, though the ideal dimensions are 1920 x 1080 pixels with a 16:9 aspect ratio and under 20 MB.

A perfect example of background image execution can be seen with Cowboy, an innovative e-bike retailer on Shopify. Their homepage showcases clean, stylish 3D product photography that immediately communicates their brand's modern approach and product quality, demonstrating how the right hero image can effectively bridge the gap between visual appeal and conversion potential.

Hero images are the large, attention-grabbing visuals placed at the top of your homepage. Their goal is to grab visitors' attention and encourage them to explore your store. Unlike background images, hero images are shorter, typically about half the height which provides the right balance between visual impact and optimal loading performance.

Your hero images should be larger 1280-2500 pixels in width and 720-1200 pixels in height. Ideal dimensions for hero images are 1920 x 1080 pixels, which means they look crisp and professional across all devices. Stick to a 16:9 aspect ratio in landscape orientation and keep files under 10 MB to ensure fast loading speeds that won't hurt your customer experience.

Here's an excellent hero image from Flourist. The company uses warm, natural lifestyle product photography that perfectly captures their brand essence as an organic flour retailer.

Now that you know the correct Shopify image sizes, let’s understand the important Shopify image types: