The Shopify image playbook
| Image type | Recommended size | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Product photos | 2048 × 2048 | Square keeps grids uniform; enough for zoom |
| Collection images | 1024 × 1024 | Displayed smaller — don’t overspend bytes |
| Hero / slideshow | 1920 × 800 (theme-dependent) | Biggest LCP risk on the homepage |
| Logo | ~450 × 250 (2× display size) | PNG/WebP with transparency |
Shopify accepts images up to 20 MP / 20 MB and serves them through its CDN, which generates responsive variants for you. But the CDN can only work with what you give it — a clean 2048 px original at quality 85 produces better variants than a noisy 12 MB upload, and your theme editor stops crawling.
Why this is a conversion issue, not a tech chore
Product pages live and die on perceived speed: shoppers bounce from pages that take more than a few seconds, and image weight is the usual cause on mobile. Compressing a catalog's photos from ~5 MB to ~300 KB each takes a page from sluggish to instant on 4G — the kind of change that shows up in conversion rate, not just Lighthouse.
Batch the whole catalog: drop every product photo at once, download the ZIP, and bulk-upload to Shopify. Square-crop first for uniform grids.