How to create strong product photos

Top-20 first, supplier images for the long tail. Minimum kit, per-product shotlist, and editing tools (Everspring Studio + ChatGPT).

Written By Bas den Hoed

Most plant resellers stall on photography. Either they shoot nothing because they're waiting until they have a "real" studio setup, or they try to shoot every SKU before launch and burn out at product 50 of 400. Both fail for the same reason: treating photography as all-or-nothing instead of as a prioritisation problem. This article is the prioritisation framework, the minimum kit, and the per-product shotlist.

💡 The most common reseller mistake: wanting to shoot everything yourself before going live. By the time you've photographed 400 SKUs in your spare time, your top sellers have shifted, half the supplier images you replaced were fine, and the shop never launched. Start with your top 20 — supplier images carry the long tail.

Top 20 first, then expand

The photography you actually need is for the products that drive most of your revenue. In a plant reseller shop, that's typically the top 20 sellers — Monstera, Ficus, Calathea, a couple of Sansevieria, the seasonal hero of the moment. These are the products customers compare across shops; this is where lifestyle photography earns its place over a clinical supplier studio shot.

For the long tail — the 380 other SKUs — supplier studio images are fine. They're consistent, high-resolution, and the customer reaching that page from a deep search has already decided to buy.

Three rules:

  1. Lifestyle for the hero, supplier studio for #2 and #3. Image one on the PDP is yours, lifestyle, in context. Images two and three can be supplier studio — neutral background, full plant, useful for comparison.

  2. Re-rank quarterly. Pull your sales report, refresh the priority list, shoot the new entries.

  3. Seasonal heroes get their own shoot — see seasonality for the rotation rhythm.

The minimum kit

Three items. That's it.

  • A phone camera from the last three years. An iPhone 13 or newer, a Pixel 7 or newer, a Samsung Galaxy S22 or newer — all of these out-resolve what you need for a 1500-pixel hero image.

  • A north-facing window. Soft, indirect daylight. No direct sun (too contrasty), no overhead office light (wrong colour temperature). Shoot between 10:00 and 14:00 when window light is brightest.

  • A white foamboard reflector. €5 at any art supply shop. Place it opposite the window to bounce light back into the shadow side of the plant. Eliminates 80% of the shadow problems beginners have.

You don't need a softbox, backdrop sweep, colour-checker, or DSLR. Add those when you're shooting 5+ products a day and speed matters. Until then, the kit above is enough — the limiting factor on most reseller shops is "we never started", not "the lights weren't good enough".

Per-product shotlist — 4 shots

Every top-20 product gets the same four shots. Consistency beats artistry — the collection grid should feel like one coherent shop, not a mood board.

  1. Hero (lifestyle). The plant in a styled corner: a sideboard, a windowsill, beside a sofa. Includes context — a book, a ceramic mug, a rug. This is image #1 on the PDP and the thumbnail in the collection grid.

  2. Pack / pot detail. Close-up on the pot or nursery sleeve. Shows what the customer actually receives — important for gifting and for managing expectations.

  3. Scale reference. The plant next to a hand, a chair, or a clearly-sized object. Critical for plants where size matters most: Monstera, Ficus Lyrata, large Calathea. "60–70cm" is abstract; a hand next to a 65cm Monstera is not.

  4. Top-down or detail. Top-down for trailing plants (Pothos, String of Pearls, Hoya) where the cascade is the visual story. Detail close-up of leaf texture for plants where the foliage is the product (Calathea Orbifolia, Alocasia Polly, variegated Monstera).

Four shots × 20 products = 80 photos. At 5 minutes per shot, that's an afternoon plus an evening of editing — not a six-month project.

Consistency in the collection grid

The collection page is a grid of thumbnails. The grid as a whole signals the level of care in your shop more than any individual photo. Two consistency rules:

  • Colour cast. Pick a single white-balance and stick to it. Some hero photos warm and others cool, side-by-side, looks amateur. If you can't fix this in editing, fix it at capture by always shooting at the same time of day.

  • Crop. Square or 4:5 portrait — pick one for hero shots, never mix. The plant should occupy roughly 60–70% of the frame, with consistent margins. The Monstera that fills the frame next to a Calathea with a tiny plant in the centre breaks the grid.

A grid of 4-megapixel phone shots with consistent colour and crop reads as professional; a grid of 24-megapixel mirrorless shots with mixed warmth and crops reads as chaotic.

Editing tools — Everspring Studio and ChatGPT

Once you have the raw shots, light editing is the difference between "phone snap" and "shop-grade". Two tools we recommend:

  • Everspring Studio — our own AI photo tool, built for plant photography specifically. Cleans up backgrounds, corrects colour cast, generates lifestyle context around a clean product shot. The fastest way to take supplier studio images and turn them into on-brand lifestyle hero shots without setting up a physical scene.

  • ChatGPT (with image input/output) — surprisingly capable for image edits and generated lifestyle backgrounds. Useful for one-off creative direction (a Christmas-themed hero, a Mother's Day arrangement) without booking a studio.

Use both in combination: Everspring Studio for production-grade consistency across your top-20 hero shots, ChatGPT for one-off seasonal or campaign creative.

File format and resolution

  • At least 1000×1000 pixels for the hero, ideally 1500×1500 or larger. Below 1000px the PDP zoom is useless; above 2500px you're pushing file size for no visible benefit.

  • JPG as master, WebP fallback if your platform supports it. JPG at quality 80–85 is the sweet spot. WebP saves another 25–30% for the same quality.

Compress before uploading. A 4MB JPG slows the page; the same image at 250KB looks identical and loads in a fraction of the time.

⚠️ Don't replace good supplier images with worse ones. If your phone shot is poorly lit, blurry, or inconsistent with the rest of the grid, it's worse than the supplier studio image even though it's "yours". Be honest in the review — if the lifestyle shot isn't better than what the supplier provided, ship the supplier shot.

Next action

Pull your sales report and list your top 20 plants by revenue over the last 90 days. Block one afternoon this week — north-facing window, foamboard, four shots per plant, 5 products. Don't try to do all 20 in one day. Edit the same evening, upload the next morning, and watch time-on-page on those PDPs over the following fortnight. Refresh the list quarterly. For copy that lives alongside these photos, see product descriptions.