When prospective clients visit your website they want to see good quality images of your products or services. The aim is to keep them flicking through your website, so they are more inclined to buy from you. 

So when you are uploading images for your website, it is important that you take the time to make sure they are perfect. Part of this is ensuring that your proportions are the same. This is important because you want all your product images to display the same way, especially if they are in a line next to each other. Images that are different sizes all over your website, can be distracting to a prospective client who wants to compare products and services. You want to make sure clients are paying attention to the content and images, not getting annoyed by the varying image sizes for products. 

Due to the large number of products your website can potentially host and display, it is important that you correctly manage product images.

It is important that you keep the size of your product images consistent - i.e. that all your image's proportions are identical. The main reason for this, is that when your product images are displayed, both when viewing product categories, or a specific product, they display with a fixed width. This means that a long, skinny image will display much larger than a short, wide image even if they are of similar resolutions. 

As can be seen above, the second image is displaying smaller, due to the proportions being different (height being low, when compared to the image's width), even though the images are the same resolution. (One is 500x100px, the other is 100x500px) This can be avoided by making sure all your product images have the same proportions as one another.

The easiest way to ensure your images are all of the same proportions, is to take them all on the same camera, and do not crop them before or after uploading them. 

If you do need to use images that are of different proportions, your best course of action is to crop these images to be the same proportion as your standard images.

Determining the desired proportions

1. Find a product image that you are pleased with the way it is displaying.
2. Open this image in the image manager by clicking on it in the product page of that product in the website manager and click edit.
3. Then click Adjustments > Crop. Take a note of the height and the width of this image. Close the image editor without saving your changes.

The dimensions of this image are 330px x 250px. These values will give you the desired proportions of your product images.

Cropping images to your desired proportions

Once you have found your desired proportions, you can begin cropping your other product images to these same proportions. You can do this prior to importing them, using an image editing program, such as Photoshop, or free alternatives.

If your images have already been uploaded, you can perform these edits using the image editor built into our website manager. To do this, you can follow these steps:

1. Open the product image that you wish to crop in the image editor.
2. Click 'Advanced Editor' in the bottom right.
3. Click on the Cropping Tool as shown. Take a note of the width of the image.
4. Select 'Aspect ratio' from the 'Constraint' drop down menu circled above.
5. Enter your desired proportions into the 'Width' and 'Height' fields (330 x 250, therefore Width=330, Height=250)
6. You can now drag a cropping rectangle over your image, and choose what to crop out. Keep your cropped image as large as possible, as has been done above. 
7. Click Save, then click Ok.

Now you're done! If you keep all of your product images at the same proportions, they will display uniformly across your site. 

An image is worth a thousand words, so stock images are a great way to quickly illustrate your point on sales and marketing materials. Not all of us are great photographers or have the equipment to take good images for our website, so it is great you can go to image depositories such as istockphoto.com, depositphotos.com and gettyimages.com (to name a few) and purchase photos and images to use across your promotional resources.

However for every great image there are hundreds of sub-par or just plain bad images. If you ever need some entertainment just look at this page for some amazingly bad examples! There are also some comic themes that pop up on these sites, such as “businessman doing yoga” or “woman laughing alone with salad” that will have you scratching your head in confusion or rolling on the floor laughing wondering what people must be writing about! 

Some tips to consider when selecting your stock images.

	If you can take a picture yourself, don’t use a stock image.  Use images that support your content. An image should quickly tell a reader what your content is about and reinforce your message, not just decorate the page.
	Don’t use a stock image for your products or staff. This may surprise you but it does happen. Having an image that isn't the actual product does nothing for the trust and credibility of your business.
	Use stock images that depict real-life scenarios. Take the businessmen doing yoga example. The likelihood of someone in a park, in a suit and tie, doing downward dog, whilst on a laptop is probably rare. Your point will be illustrated much better with another image.
	Beware of overused images. Take a look at your competitor’s sites and make sure you aren’t using the same or similar images. You need to find an image that will represent your brand in a unique way.
	If you plan on using the image in print, don’t buy the low-resolution web version. Your picture will look pixelated and blurry when you try to make it bigger.
	Refresh your images. Design trends change and so the image you purchased in 2002 will no doubt be outdated. Look at the people in your images and be aware of clothing and hairstyle trends that will date your images (unless you are specifically after a retro look).