Etsy Moving to Square Photos on Shop Home Pages
Screenshot of my shop home page in July; these photos will change to squares in "early August".
Although Etsy hasn't sent out warning emails or posted notifications on shop manager dashboards yet, the forum Announcements section let us know that Etsy would be changing the ratio of images on shop home pages in early August. (Yes, they are only giving us a few weeks notice. Perfectly reasonable, right? 🙄) The decision was based on the much-maligned tests run in June and July, where many shops saw their product photographs bizarrely zoomed and cropped, with no explanation from Etsy.
Turns out that those tests showed a higher conversion rate for squares, so that is where Etsy is headed. Problem is, we don't know if they are going to properly adjust the crops or not, which they did not do when testing. During that experiment, many of my square photos were zoomed then cropped off on one side, in part because Etsy hadn't removed my previous use of the cropping tool for rectangular shapes. The issues were just as bad or even worse for sellers who mostly used rectangular photos to match the shape of Etsy's gallery displays.
Many sellers are panicking, worrying that they will have to redo thousands of photos in just a few weeks time. Etsy states that "No immediate action is required, however, you may want to start taking and uploading images with this format in mind." Since search pages will still have rectangular product images, squares will not always work (unless set up to look decent in both shapes).
What should sellers do?
I suggest waiting to see what your items look like in this new format before making changes to older images. We don't know whether or not Etsy is going to fix the problems displayed during the experiments. Shooting new listings with both shapes in mind is definitely a good idea, but it is possible your older photographs will look good enough to avoid getting out your camera again.
My best guess is that they will not make the same weird cropping errors with already square photos like mine, as they are not currently doing that on Market pages, where square photos are the norm. See an example below, and compare to the screenshot of my shop home page rectangles above:
Note that my earrings show up fine as a square on the Market page. This listing photo was shown cropped off on each side during the shop home page square test. However, my original photo was taken to look okay as both a square and an Etsy gallery rectangle: a square shape with extra space above and below the earrings. The listing photo in the top right corner above was apparently taken to fill the rectangle shape on each side, so the earrings on the right and left are cut off in square view. This is a problem that many shops may face, depending on how Etsy formats the new home pages.
If you want to check how your current photos look as squares, use this trick to see them on a Market page. (You may need to narrow results by price to find your listing easily.) However, remember that we cannot be certain this is how Etsy will display pics on home pages come August. If we learn more about it, I will update this post.
UPDATE (August 2, 2023): Unfortunately, Etsy went live with the changes today and didn't fix any of the shop home coding, so my photos are weirdly cropped again, and I cannot fix them with Etsy's cropping tool. This shouldn't happen, as my photos are already square!
This is what Etsy has chosen to do with my square photos. Why not just, you know, display the squares I uploaded? Sigh...
If you are taking new photos and want them to work in both formats, you will need to leave space around the outer rim of the image, so you don't lose vital parts of your product when Etsy changes the photo shape. I've been using squares with empty space on the top and bottom of each shot, which is so far working fine on the Market page squares. This may not work for all types of products, however.
If you learn anything from Etsy about this, please post below, or send me an email, so we can share this info with other sellers.
