AI Images for your website
It’s all work work work for your AI images on your website.
I have not spoken about AI before, and, in fact, I’m somewhat dubious about the whole Artificial Intelligence movement, there’s far too much hype and really not a lot of substance. But I shan’t do the usual and dive into the definition of AI, machine learning, sentient beings and all the other clap-trap.
Instead a brief history of product photography on websites.
In the beginning, someone would take photos of products in as near ‘white-background’ conditions as they could, later early editions of Photoshop would allow you to further white the background and then cut out the background altogether. The result is nice stand-alone products that look good on most resolutions across all websites. Amazon set rules, and generally accepted dimensions were formed, let’s say 1000×1000 pixels at 72dpi.
The purpose was not to standardise everything but to ensure that images could be used over and over across multiple devices and platforms. The same image could be found on Amazon, eBay, Etsy and NotOnTheHighStreet as well as an organisation’s own website.
It considerably lightened the workload for graphic designers and meant product photographers could produce similar images over and over again. For example to add a new Colourway to a product, rather than re-taking all the colourways of a product, if all the known attributes were in place, then a new photo could be produced reasonably quickly.
Where does AI fit in
So – you have nicely built smart-looking products on an e-Commerce website – all is well… However the competition is hotting up and bigger players are moving in, there’s a swing from plain product shots to lifestyle images, displaying the product in use, also, it’s not enough to have one image, there’s a need to have lots, from every angle and in every situation, as well as every colour, size or another attribute, not to mention close-ups of specific features, the list goes on.
Ai – itself does not come into this at all… But what does is a lot of hard work. the problem is others will do it if you do not. Every single image of a product potentially needs to be made more ‘exciting. And this is where the so-called AI comes in. No longer will people be satisfied to see a product on a white background, the background needs to enhance the product. Maybe add text, overlay the image with an effect, or add a more exciting background.
The term AI is wrong in this context, although it won’t be long before we start seeing AI versions of the product being shown on websites – to further mark out and dramatise a product. Who wants to buy a boring old hotel room when the photos can be enhanced to make things look that much cooler?
The Social Media Influence
What is driving this trend to use enhanced images for selling products? It has to be Instagram, which has reached levels of adoption not seen on any other Social Media platform. But gone at the days of taking a photo and applying a filter, now it’s all reels, stories, words, shapes, gifs and gadgets. That ability to manipulate images is what is leading to this AI explosion within product images.
How soon before people will be bored of seeing yet another pair of Nike displayed for sale on a website, when the image could be far more along the lines of an Instagram Feed? We have already had our first client requesting if they could replace their Photos on their e-commerce website with direct Instagram Feeds of their products. Simply put this means just adding more and more images to the website for very little extra work.
It makes sense.
Steps to take
Get ready for AI – every photo of every product will need to be processed through an AI tool of some sort. It will take time and someone has to do the grunt work.
Decisions will need to be taken to decide what effects suit your brand, some of this will be influenced by by what is already happening on your Instagram account.
So roughly this could be the point where Social Media overtakes your website by dictating to the website how products should be presented.
And for all of this, there is plenty of scope for AI to get involved. AI and I use the term loosely, can be used to mass generate product images in a variety of ways. The final question I leave you with is to ascertain if should considerably more doctored images on your website will help sell product?