Where to Get Product Photos for Your Store

Your safest product photos are the ones you took, and the second safest are the ones a supplier gave you written permission to use. Everything else on the list is a judgement call about somebody else's copyright.

That sounds like an unhelpful answer until you have watched a store lose an entire product catalogue's imagery to one email from a brand's legal team. The useful version of this article is not "hire a photographer". It is: here is each source, here is who owns what, and here is the one thing about supplier files that almost nobody checks before uploading.

None of this is legal advice, and copyright works differently in different countries. It is the shape of the problem, so you know which questions to ask.

Can you use your supplier's product images?

Not automatically. Being allowed to sell a product and being allowed to publish the photographs of it are two separate permissions, and one does not imply the other.

The reason is that copyright attaches the moment the photo is taken. The US Copyright Office puts it plainly: protection "exists automatically in an original work of authorship once it is fixed", and photographs are on their list of protected works. Nobody has to register anything, add a watermark, or write a notice. The photographer owns the picture from the shutter click, and if the supplier commissioned it, the supplier normally owns it after that.

So the question is never "is this image protected". It is "did the owner give me a licence". For most dropshipping and wholesale relationships, the answer is that they probably will, and it takes one email to find out:

Hi, we are listing your products on our Shopify store. Can you confirm in writing that we may use your product photography on our storefront, in ads, and on marketplaces? A media pack or a link to your asset library would be ideal.

Get the reply in writing and keep it. That single email is the difference between a source you can rely on for years and a source you are quietly hoping nobody checks.

Where can product photos legally come from?

The two rows people get wrong are the marketplace and the media pack.

A marketplace listing is not a source. Pulling an image off an AliExpress product page feels like taking it from the supplier, and often it literally is the same picture. But the version you are copying was uploaded by a seller account, under that marketplace's terms, and neither the marketplace nor that seller has given you anything. Ask the supplier directly for the file instead. You will usually get a better copy of the same photo, at a resolution the marketplace had compressed away.

A media pack usually has conditions attached. Brands that publish an asset library tend to put rules in it: do not crop the logo, do not apply filters, do not place text over the pack shot, do not use the lifestyle images for paid ads. Those conditions are the licence. Breaking them is not a grey area, it is using the images outside the permission you were given.

What is hiding inside a supplier's image file?

This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the reason this article exists.

A photograph is not just pixels. JPEG and TIFF files carry EXIF and IPTC metadata written by the camera and by whoever edited the file, and a straight download-and-upload republishes all of it on your storefront. What is typically in there:

• GPS coordinates. Cameras and every phone tag latitude and longitude by default. On a supplier's product shot that is the location of their studio or warehouse.
• Camera make, model and serial number. Serial numbers are how a specific camera gets linked to a specific body of work, which is exactly how stolen photography gets traced.
• Date and time of capture, down to the second.
• Author, creator and copyright fields. The photographer's name, and sometimes an explicit copyright notice, sitting inside a file you are publishing as your own product image.
• Editing history, in the XMP block, including the software and occasionally the original filename.

None of it is visible in the image. All of it ships with the file, and any of it can be read back out with a free tool. Two of those fields, the copyright notice and the author, are also the neatest possible evidence that the file did not come from you.

Strip the metadata before upload. Then look at the filename too: IMG_4471.jpg and DSC_0093.jpg are the default names of somebody else's camera, and while the SEO value of a filename is small, the value of not shipping your supplier's file naming to Google Images is not zero. Rename to something that describes the product, and write real alt text while you are at it, which is worth more than the filename and is covered in Shopify alt text.

What if there is no photo at all?

Plenty of catalogues have hundreds of products with nothing. The options, in the order they are worth trying:

1. Ask the supplier for the media pack. Free, fast, and usually the best files anybody has.
2. Shoot the ones that sell. You do not need a studio for this. Daylight from a window, a sheet of white card bent into a curve behind the product, a phone, and one afternoon covers more of a catalogue than most people expect. Shoot your best sellers first, because a photograph on a product nobody views is effort spent on nothing.
3. Use the brand's asset library. Larger manufacturers publish one. Search for the brand name plus "media kit" or "press assets".
4. Buy one shoot for the category. If forty products are variations of the same silhouette, one good set of shots plus consistent staging carries the category further than forty bad ones.
5. Leave the placeholder rather than publish a stolen file. A missing image costs you a conversion. A copyright complaint on a live storefront can cost you the listing.

The dimensions to shoot and export at are in Shopify image sizes, and the short version is 2048 x 2048, square, under 500 KB.

Do AI-generated product photos work?

For lifestyle backgrounds and abstract category headers, they are fine and getting better. For the actual product, they are a trap, and it is worth being specific about why rather than gesturing at "authenticity".

A generated image is not your SKU. It is a plausible object with the right general shape. The button count is wrong, the stitching runs the wrong way, the logo is a smear that looks like lettering, the cable has three connectors. Customers who buy from that image and receive something else return it, and returns cost more than photography.

It quietly becomes a description problem too. If the image shows a feature the product does not have, every downstream piece of copy written from that image inherits the error.

Some categories cannot use it at all. Anything where a customer is matching an exact part, a colourway or a size is a category where a nearly-right picture is worse than no picture.

Where generative editing genuinely earns its place is on photos you already own: removing a background, extending a canvas, cleaning up a shadow. That is retouching, and it has been normal for twenty years.

The equivalent question about generated text has a clearer answer, because Google has written its position down, and it is worked through in AI product descriptions for Shopify. The short version is that the method is not the test, the accuracy is. That applies to pixels as much as to sentences, and pixels are where accuracy is hardest to check.

Images are one line in a longer sequence of work, and where it sits relative to everything else is in the Shopify SEO checklist.

FAQ

Can I use my supplier's images on my Shopify store? Only with permission. Copyright exists automatically from the moment the photo is taken, and being allowed to resell a product does not include a licence to its photography. Most suppliers grant it if you ask in writing.

Can I use images from AliExpress or Amazon? No. Those files were uploaded by a seller account under the marketplace's terms, and neither the marketplace nor that seller is giving you a licence. Ask the supplier for the original file.

Can I use Google Images for product photos? No. Google Images is an index of pictures published elsewhere, not a source of licensed images. Every result still belongs to whoever put it online.

Do product photos have hidden data in them? Yes. EXIF and IPTC metadata can include GPS coordinates, camera model and serial number, capture date, and the photographer's name and copyright notice. It uploads with the file unless you strip it.

Are AI-generated product images allowed on Shopify? There is no rule against them, but for the product itself they misrepresent details and drive returns. They are most useful for backgrounds and for editing photos you already own.

How many photos does a product need? Three to five covers most catalogues: the main pack shot, a detail, a scale or in-use shot, and the back or the label where it matters. One good image beats five inconsistent ones.

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The honest summary is that image sourcing is a permission problem wearing a technical costume. The technical part, stripping the metadata and getting the file to the right size and format, is solvable in a second. Knowing whether you are allowed to publish the file is the part that takes the email.

Yikfy is built around that order. Its image search returns nothing at all until you have listed the domains you are allowed to take images from, on the Image Sources page, so the permission decision is made once, by you, before any file is fetched. From then on the search only looks at those sites, and you can set a minimum width and height so the low-resolution copies never reach you.

Everything that comes back is re-encoded before it touches your store: EXIF, GPS, IPTC and XMP are stripped, and the file can be converted to WebP on the way through. The descriptions, meta titles and meta descriptions are generated in the same pass, and nothing publishes until you have approved it in the review queue.