How to take good product photos with your phone
Bad photos cost you sales. Not because customers are shallow, but because a dark, cluttered photo makes a good product look like a bad one, and online that's all they have to go on.
The good news is you don't need a camera, a studio or a photographer. A modern phone is better than most cameras were ten years ago. What you need is light and a clean background, and both are free.
What you need
- A phone
- A window
- A large sheet of white paper, a white poster board, or a plain white sheet
- Something to prop the paper against — a chair, a box, a wall
- A sheet of tin foil or a second piece of white card
That's it. Total cost, if you have to buy anything at all, is a few euro.
Setting it up
Find a window with daylight but no direct sun. North-facing is ideal. Direct sunlight creates hard shadows and blown-out white patches. An overcast day is genuinely better than a bright one.
Put a table beside the window, side-on, so the light comes from the left or right rather than behind or in front.
Curve your white paper from the table surface up against a chair or wall behind, so there's no hard line where the table meets the background. That soft curve is the entire trick behind those clean white product shots you see online. It's called a sweep, and it costs about a euro.
Put the product in the middle, a few inches forward from the back of the curve.
Bounce light back in. Hold the tin foil or second sheet of card on the shadow side, opposite the window. Watch the shadows soften. Move it closer and further until it looks right. This single step is the difference between an amateur photo and one that looks deliberate.
Set it up once and leave it up
If you've more than a handful of products, don't build this every time.
Find a corner where the rig can stay — a spare desk by a window, an unused bench, a corner of the storeroom. Mark the position of the table and the phone with tape on the floor so it goes back identically if it does get moved.
That way anyone can walk over with a new line, take three shots, and have them match everything already on the site. Products photographed months apart in different corners never quite look like they belong together, and that's what makes a shop look cobbled together.
Taking the shot
Turn the flash off. Always. Phone flash is a small, hard light directly in front of the subject — it flattens everything and throws a harsh shadow behind. Daylight is better in every case.
Clean the lens. It's been in someone's pocket. Two seconds, and it makes more difference than most people expect.
Tap to focus on the product, then slide the exposure up or down until the whites look white rather than grey. Phone cameras tend to underexpose against a white background.
Hold still, or prop it. Elbows on the table. Better still, prop the phone against something. Any blur reads as cheap.
Don't zoom. Phone zoom crops the image and loses detail. Move closer instead.
Shoot a bit wider than you need. You can crop in later; you can't crop out.
What shots to take
Three per product covers almost everything:
- Straight on, the whole product, centred. This is your main image
- At an angle, so it has some depth
- Close on a detail — the stitching, the label, the texture, the finish
If scale matters, add a fourth with something recognisable beside it or someone holding it. "How big is it actually" is the most common unanswered question in online shopping.
For clothing, on a person beats flat on a table every time, even if the person is someone from the office standing against a wall.
Editing
Keep it minimal. You're correcting, not creating.
- Brightness up slightly if the whites look grey
- Contrast up a touch, but only a touch
- Straighten so edges are level. Crooked photos look careless
- Crop square. Most online shops display product images square and will crop anything else themselves, usually badly
That's all. Don't use filters. A warm vintage filter means the customer receives something a different colour to what they ordered, and that's a return and a bad review.
Getting the background properly white
If your white paper is coming out grey — and it will, because cameras average everything towards grey — raise the exposure when you shoot rather than fixing it afterwards. Tap the product to focus, then slide the little sun icon up until the background looks white on screen.
Careful not to go too far. If the edges of the product start disappearing into the background, you've overdone it.
If more than one person is doing this
Photos taken by three people in three different spots will never look like a set, no matter how good each one is individually.
Write the setup down. Half a page: which window, where the table goes, phone height, flash off, three shots per product, no filters. Stick it beside the rig.
One person does the editing, even if several people shoot. Consistency in the edit matters more than consistency in the shooting.
Agree the file naming before anyone starts. Product name, then a number for the order — beeswax-candle-large-1.jpg. Three naming conventions is a bigger problem than three photographers.
The mistakes I see most
Photographing on a patterned worktop or a wooden bench. The pattern competes with the product and the whole thing looks like a classified ad.
Photographing at night under a ceiling light. Indoor bulbs cast a yellow or green tint and come from directly overhead, the least flattering angle there is. Wait for the morning.
One photo, taken from above, of everything. Each product needs its own set. A single group shot tells a customer nothing about the item they're actually buying.
Screenshots instead of photos. If someone took the picture, use the picture. Screenshots lose quality and pick up interface clutter.
Different backgrounds for different products. A shop where every photo has a different background looks disorganised.
Supplier photos used as your own. Tempting if you're reselling, but everyone else selling that line has the identical image, and you may not have permission to use it. Your own photos are one of the few things that make your listing different from the next shop's.
Do them in batches, not one at a time
Block out a morning, work through everything in one go. An hour of setup and two hours of shooting will do fifty products.
Doing them piecemeal over weeks means the light differs, the setup differs, and the shop ends up looking like a car boot sale.
If you're adding new lines regularly, put it in the diary — a photo session the first Monday of every month beats photographing things individually as they arrive.
When to pay a photographer
There are cases where it's worth it:
- Jewellery, glass or anything highly reflective. Genuinely difficult, and it shows
- Food, where the styling matters as much as the light
- Clothing, if you want proper model shots
- Your hero products — the twenty that drive most of your sales. Pay for those, do the rest yourself. That's usually better value than a full shoot
- Anything expensive enough that presentation is part of what you're selling
For most things — hardware, gifts, homeware, crafts, tools, plants — the window-and-paper method is honestly fine.
One last thing
Consistency beats quality. Fifty decent photos that all look like they belong together will sell better than five beautiful ones and forty-five poor ones.
Set up once, be a bit disciplined, and the shop will look considered — which is what customers are actually reading when they look at your photos.
Getting an online shop built? Have a look at my product upload guide for exactly what to send me, and how to name your files so nothing goes astray.