The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Product Photography Workflow
Ecommerce product photography production often sounds simple, (how hard can it be to take a product photo and put it online?) but as business grows, producing and managing thousands of assets can get pretty tricky. As a photographer, creating a repeatable product photography workflow that produces consistent and accurate results is essential to any successful ecommerce business. Not only will it save you time and money but it will allow you to take your hands off managing every step along the way while keeping your content on-brand.
Like any organizational system, an efficient workflow requires some initial effort but will save time and ensure consistent, high-quality final products down the road. To produce great product images, every commercial photography process should start with three simple steps:
ID your samples
Create a style guide
Use a shot list
Step 1 - Organizing Samples: Time to Identify
First, identify and tag your samples. If you are working with a large amount of samples and multiple people are handling them, things can get pretty messy, pretty fast during shoot day if samples don’t have identification. Without tags, there’s no way to confirm what you have, what you’ve shot, or what needs to be passed to the next team. Tagged samples will ensure you get the right products shot at the right time and that assets will be named correctly so you can easily add them to the correct product pages on your website. This should be a requirement for anyone handling your samples.
A professional photo/styling team should always return samples re-tagged so you can pass them off to the next team. Without tags products can easily be mixed up.
The most important information to include on the tag is a unique identifier that is only associated with that specific product. At the very least it can be a product name or description (Long Sleeve Shirt) but ideally it would include a SKU (+ color if your products are differentiated by color). As your product line grows, SKU/color will keep your products organized and unique and will easily integrate with your product information management (PIM) or content management system (CMS).
Step 2 - The Style Guide: One Source Of Truth
Next up in creating a streamlined product photography workflow, is the style guide. This is just as important as tagging your samples as it helps you maintain consistent on-brand imagery and alleviates the back and forth between brand and photo team. A style guide is one source of truth that the photo team can continually refer to at every shoot to match. It helps the shoot run more efficiently as you can use it to organize the shoot ahead of time by grouping similar shots.
Style guides help ensure consistency at every shoot, keeping your imagery on-brand and allowing your photo team to move quickly without sacrificing quality.
A thorough and clear style guide includes standards on type of views, camera setting, lighting & background direction, and product styling so there’s no questions during the shoot. Style guides ensure that the look and feel of your brand is consistently captured in your product photos. Too many shoots slow down because of unclear direction. This can be incredibly costly, especially if you have multiple people on-set waiting around. More content can be created in less time with a well made style guide in hand. It will also automate your shot list creation if product views by category are listed.
Step 3 - Creating a Product Photography Shot List: The Keystone for a Good Workflow
Finally the shot list—the keystone of every shoot. At the very least a shot list is a list of products to be shot, however a shot list can include much more than that; from types of shots needed to additional product information like size, category, UPC, season, and much more! This information is used to tell the photo team what product they’re shooting, how to shoot it, what to name the assets, and what additional asset information they may need, like delivery dates, metadata, etc. Shot lists are an indispensable piece in a streamlined commercial photography workflow for product photographers.
Make sure the ID on the product label, whether that be SKU/color, UPC, product name, or other unique ID, is listed on the shot list. This is necessary to match the product to the assets and the foundation of any organized production system. If you’ve created a thorough style guide with product views then you’re all set. The photo team can use the shot list and style guide to ensure all views get shot and shot correctly. In some cases you may need to include the product category to cross reference the style guide or additional product info if you’d like to add metadata to the assets.
Information on the shot lists should be customized to your specific needs. Keep in mind that this is used to connect your physical products to the image assets.
Best Practices for Tracking & Archiving
Now that you have labeled samples, a style guide, and a shot list, samples and assets can be tracked through each stage of production. In a well-structured workflow, tracking samples and assets will ensures nothing gets skipped over or lost and provides transparency for all teams. Each stage of production should be confirmed on the shot list before moving to the next:
Sample Receipt & Prep
Shoot
Raw Image Approval
Post-Production
Photo Editing Approval
Final Asset & Final Image Delivery
Sample Return
Stages may differ slightly depending on your unique needs and levels of approval but start here. Using your shot list to track each stage of production gives you an archive of historical information that you can always return to. Did that product ever get shot? Check the shot list. Was that SKU sent to the studio? Check the shot list. Was that product image approved to go to the next stage? Check the shot list.
Questions will always come up when you’re working with a large volume of products–having a trackable shot list will ensure those questions can be answered correctly.
The final step to a streamlined product photography workflow is archiving your assets. If you’ve made it this far, this is the easy part. Since you’ve already named assets according to your shot list and added any metadata you may need, the final step is simply adding those images to a location that makes sense for your business (a cloud-based DAM system, physical hardware, or an internal server). Structure your asset library in an organized fashion and stay consistent with it. That may mean organizing by shoot date, delivery, date, season, product category or a combination of these things. The important part is to identify a folder structure that will make it easy for your team and partners to find what they’re looking for and to stay consistent with that structure. For professional product photography shoots, it’s best practice to keep your image files organized to simplify the post-production process.
Decide on an organizational structure for your image library and stick with it. Folder names should follow a specific naming scheme or pattern to make it easy to find assets.
Streamlining Your Product Photography Workflow for Impactful Product Photos
Streamlining your workflow is key to producing efficient, consistent, and high-quality images that make your product shine. As your content volume increases, it’s important that you have a scalable solution in place to prevent costly mistakes and incorrect product images. Any successful product photography workflow should start by implementing the 3 simple steps discussed above—tag your product samples, create a style guide, and use a shot list that helps you stay organized. Once you have these foundational steps in place, you will see faster turnaround times, fewer errors, and higher output. All of which contribute to enhancing your product photography and growing your business.
Is your production workflow manual and error-prone? Contact Hyperblack to see how we can optimize your ecommerce photo shoots!
