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Images & media

Every image you put in a form or an email lives in one place, under Content → Images & media. You upload it once and use it anywhere; when you change its description, every form and every email you send from then on uses the new one.

You never copy a web address for an image, and there is nowhere to paste one. A form or an email points at the image itself, which is what makes the next two things true: an image you are using cannot be deleted by accident, and an image you fix stays fixed everywhere.

Paging. Under the grid you choose how many to show at a time — 25, 50 or 100 per page — and step through with Previous and Next. The line beside them says where you are: Page 3 of 5. Type a number in the box to jump straight to a page. The page you are on is part of the address, so opening an image and coming back puts you back where you were, and the size you choose is remembered the next time you open this screen. Searching or changing a filter takes you back to the first page. When you pick an image from inside a form or an email you get the same grid with a Show more button instead, because there is no address bar in a window that opens over your work.

Adding images

Drag images onto the page, or choose Upload and pick them. You can do the same thing without leaving the form editor: any image control opens the same library, with Your images and Upload side by side, so an image you add from inside a form lands in your library and in the form in one motion.

Drop as many as you like. Four upload at a time and the rest wait their turn. Each one is on its own — if one image is too big or turns out not to be an image at all, the others finish anyway.

Nothing goes up until you say so. A tile waits with a Description (alt text) box on it. Write the sentence and choose Add image — or press Enter in the box — and it starts. Typing alone never starts it, so you can take as long over the words as you like. Marking the image decorative, or asking Talaria to draft the words, starts it straight away, because each of those is already a decision.

Each tile shows you where it has got to: a ring that fills as the file goes up, then Optimizing… for the second or two it takes to make the sizes described below, then the image itself with a line saying how much smaller it got.

An image that did not finish says so and offers to try again. That happens when a connection drops mid-upload; nothing is lost by trying a second time.

What you can upload: JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF, including animated GIFs. Not SVG — an SVG file can carry code as well as artwork, and it is not worth the risk on your storefront. No video and no PDF.

What happens to an image when you upload it

Your image is made smaller, and you are told by how much — "4.5 MB → 66 KB". Photographs straight from your phone or a camera are enormous by the standards of a web page, and every one of those megabytes is time a visitor spends waiting and data they pay for. The number is the difference between what you handed us and what a reader actually downloads.

Your original is kept, untouched. You are never asked to choose a size or a quality setting; that decision was made once, carefully, for every image.

A few sizes are made from it, because the right size for a mobile screen is not the right size for a wide screen or for an email. Your form asks for the one that fits the screen it is on. In email, the image is always a JPEG or a PNG, never a newer format, because some email apps — Outlook on Windows above all — show nothing at all in their place.

Why the saving is different every time. A photograph with lots of detail cannot be squeezed as hard as a flat graphic with three colors in it, and an image that was already saved for the web has less to give. A small number is not a failure; it means the image was already close to the right size.

What a photograph carries invisibly does not travel with it. Photographs hold hidden information — the camera, its settings, sometimes the exact place the image was taken. That is stripped from every size we make from yours, so it is never on your storefront and never in an email you send. Your original keeps it, and your original is never published.

Animations are left exactly as you made them. An animated GIF is stored and served as the file you uploaded, frame for frame, because re-making an animation is where frames get dropped and loops stop looping. That is a deliberate trade and it has one consequence worth knowing: because we do not rebuild the file, we also do not strip anything out of it — any comment or extra information the GIF already carried travels with it. (The still image used for its tile is made fresh, so that one is clean.)

Big animations are slow, and the editor says so rather than stopping you. An animation over about 5 MB takes a noticeable time on mobile, some email apps show only its first frame, and a form waits for it before it appears.

Describing an image

Every image needs a description, or has to be marked as decorative. The field is called Description (alt text) — alt text is the web's own name for it, and this is the same thing. The description is what somebody hears if they cannot see the image, and it is what a search looks through when you are trying to find an image six months later — along with the file name, and a search of more than one word needs every word to match, wherever each of them falls. An image that is purely decoration — a divider, a texture, a shape behind some words — is marked as such, and then it is passed over silently instead of being announced as nothing.

An image that is a live form's teaser, with no words beside it, keeps its description. That description is the teaser's only name, and a teaser with no name is not shown — so marking the image decorative is refused, and the form is named. Put words on the teaser first, and then the image can be decorative.

Talaria writes the first draft. As soon as an image is up, Talaria looks at it and suggests a plain sentence saying what is in it: "A tube of red lipstick lying on a marble surface." Change it if it is wrong or if there is something about this image that matters to you and not to a stranger. You can also type your own description before Talaria has finished, and yours is the one that is kept.

Only the small copy leaves. To draft that sentence, the small version of your image is processed by a model provider; nothing else about your store goes with it, and your original never leaves. Our privacy page says so too, because your product shots are yours.

"Describe this image to finish." If neither you nor Talaria has written anything by the time an image is optimized, the image is kept and shown in your library with its description box open and that sentence beside it. It is not lost and nothing went wrong — it just cannot be used in a form or an email until it has its words. Type a description, or mark it decorative, and it is ready.

Where an image is used

Open any image and Used in lists everything that points at it — your forms, your emails, any Library element an email links, the campaigns that carried it, and Store settings if this is the image you chose as your store logo. It is the answer to "can I get rid of this?" and to "which form was that image in again?".

An image used by a form that is live on your storefront right now is marked as such, separately from one that only an older version of that form mentions.

Archive and delete

Archive takes an image out of the way. It disappears from the picker and from your library's main view, and you find it again under Archived, where Restore puts it back. Archiving is never refused and never changes anything on your storefront — a live form using an archived image keeps showing it. Most of the time archiving is what people actually mean.

Delete is refused while anything live is using the image, and the refusal names what: the forms, emails, Library elements and campaigns you would break, and your store logo if it is that. Archive it instead, or change those places first. Email you have already sent never blocks a delete — nothing could ever be deleted if it did.

Deleting is reversible. The image leaves your library and turns up under Recently deleted, where Restore puts it back. Nothing is destroyed for at least 30 days; after that the file itself is removed and the image cannot be brought back.

An upload that never finished does not cost you a place for long. If you close the tab or your connection drops part-way, the space that upload was holding comes back within a day on its own — and at once if your library is full, because we tidy those up before telling you there is no room.

Email you have already sent keeps its images. An image that appears in a campaign you sent last year is kept for that campaign even after you delete it from your library, so an email somebody opens today still looks the way it did.

Limits

• 10 MB per image, and 20 MB for an animated GIF.
• 8,192 pixels on the long side.
• 10,000 images per store.

Everything you are holding counts toward the 10,000, including what is in Recently deleted. Deleting is reversible for 30 days, so a deleted image is still yours to bring back and still takes a place — the place comes back when the image is cleared for good, 30 days after you delete it. Archived images count too; archiving is tidying, not room.

The size counts the same way. An image in Recently deleted is still stored, so the figure at the top of this screen does not drop when you delete something. It drops when the image is cleared for good.

If a file is over a limit you are told which limit and what the number was, and most apps that edit images can export a smaller copy.

Where the count is. One quiet line under the heading of Images & media reads how many images you are holding, how much space they take, and the most a store can hold — 424 images · 289 MB · up to 10,000. When anything is in Recently deleted the line says how many, so the number over the grid and the number in it never disagree without explaining themselves: 424 images · 289 MB · up to 10,000 · 2 in Recently deleted. An empty bin is not mentioned.

It used to be a card in Store settings, which is not where the images are; it is not a setting, so it moved to them. If the count has never been worked out the line says not counted yet rather than showing a zero, because nothing counted and nothing there are different pieces of news — and a library with no images in it draws no line at all.