Should I resize my images when uploading through the theme editor?

5d ago (edited) in General

The short answer is: NO

Also, another question regarding images that I often get is: "What format should I use, JPG or PNG?"

The answer is: It doesn't matter, but if you need transparency of course you must use the PNG format.

If you'd like to know a bit more read below.

So, as we all know, Shopify services are very powerful, including their Image APIs. Unless you are using a very bad theme (or a very old one), actually you don't need to do any image resizing or format alterations. That's because Shopify handles it automatically for you.

But, this "power" is managed by the theme. It's the theme's job to correctly crop images according to the user's screen resolution (mobile/tablet/desktop) and serve the adequate image size.

For the second question, Shopify CDN now serves images by default in the "WEBP" format, which is a new image format that provides superior compression and is adapted for web usage. So it doesn't matter if you upload your images in PNG or JPG or any other format, the Shopify CDN will try to serve those images in this new "WEBP" format.

So to conclude, always upload the highest quality image possible, including product images, and Shopify, through the theme, will handle resizing and image formatting for you.

Note: Shopify has a limit for image uploads. The maximum allowed dimensions are 5000x5000 pixels and the maximum size is 20 MB. Usually, I prefer images with dimensions of around 2000-3000px

Lastly, I have noticed also that some store owners have very bad quality product photos (with dimensions less than 500px), which creates issues like the inability for Shopify to correctly crop them, and as a result, these images will look weird on collection pages.

Do you have anything else unclear about your images?! Comment below

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