Photos are the face of your products for your online store. Any photo is better than no photo, but improving your product images can have a huge impact on sales, reduce customer support requests, and minimize refunds or exchanges. Here are some tips for showcasing your products at their best in Übercart.

Make product images clear and consistent

Print catalogs typically hire one illustrator or photography studio to create all the product images in a section; at the very least, they have an art director to ensure that the tone and style are consistent. Even if you don’t have that luxury—if you get your graphics from multiple sources, for example—a few minutes in Photoshop can turn a visual jumble into a collection where all the pieces look like they belong. You can do this by processing all images to have the same proportions, or be the same apparent size, or have the same effects (such as a drop shadow or glow). 

Which one of these more clearly shows what’s being sold?  With the one on the right, there can be no mistake.  Imagine your customers trying to quickly scan over a page full of product photos like the one on the left!

Show the product in context, especially if you can put several products into one shot

Taking a different tack, you could use carefully composed product photos that show not only what the product is, but also what it does. Done right, you invite customers to get past the purchase process to see how the product will benefit them in use: The purchase itself becomes a mere step on the way to gratification.

Use multiple product images

If you upload more than one product image, Übercart smartly highlights the first one as its “main” image: It shows up in product lists, and in an especially large format on the product’s own page. The rest of the images show up on that page a bit smaller. These smaller images can give customers alternate views of the product, pictures of the product’s included accessories, or anything else you think will help them feel more comfortable about buying it.

Optimizing your images with ImageCache

Übercart’s default ImageCache presets can be a bit on the small size. If you want to change the size, cropping, and many other aspects of these automatically-generated image sizes, go to /admin/build/imagecache and tweak to your heart’s content! Changes are always made preserving the original file you uploaded, so you can play around with different settings here without damaging your original photo. Remember to click "Flush" next to any changed presets when you’re done so ImageCache regenerates your photos.

Über-ÜberTip: square thumbnails can be a great way to make your catalog look polished and consistent. However, if you’ve got images on white backgrounds (like our wine glass shown above), you may be wondering how to have a white background fill in the empty space when you create a square crop. The ImageCage Actions module is what you want, which will let you define a canvas background color.

More Übercart image tips

Check out our full Übercart guide!