Square product card templates — 1200 × 1200

The rules that get listings rejected

Marketplaces are specific about the main image in a way they are not about the rest of the gallery. Pure white backgrounds, no props, no text overlays, no borders, no watermarks, and the product filling most of the frame are typical requirements — and they are enforced automatically.

The resolution floor matters as much: many platforms only enable zoom above 1000 pixels on the longest side, and a listing without zoom converts worse. 1200 gives headroom above that line.

Secondary gallery images are where lifestyle shots, scale references and text belong. Keep the main image clinical and put the personality in slots two onward.

Consistency beats any single image

A catalogue is viewed as a grid, and the grid is what forms an impression. Twenty images at slightly different distances, angles and crops read as amateur even when each one is individually good.

Fix the setup once — same background, same lighting, same camera distance, product centred and filling roughly the same proportion of every frame — and the grid does the work. It is also what makes a single automated pass over the whole set produce usable results.

Preparing the photograph

Getting to a clean white background is the usual bottleneck. Shooting against a white sweep and lifting the exposure gets you most of the way; anything shot in a real room needs the background removed rather than brightened, because brightening a room turns shadows grey rather than white.

Once the subject is cut out, place it on a fixed canvas with consistent margins rather than cropping each image by eye. That is the step that makes twenty photographs look like one catalogue.