Selling online from Quebec means feeding half a dozen different image slots at once: Amazon expects a pure-white main frame, Shopify wants square tiles that look tidy in a mobile grid, Etsy rewards a lifestyle first-image, and Meta Ads eats through creatives in weeks. Handling ecommerce photography Montreal-side gets easier when one studio day is planned to produce every one of those files, sized and named for each channel, from a single set of master frames. This guide is the plain-English version of how we brief that kind of shoot for local DTC and marketplace sellers, what each platform actually requires, and where a Montreal-based session saves you time compared to shipping products out of province.
Ecommerce photography Montreal: what each platform actually requires
Every marketplace publishes its own image rules, and the specs change often enough that we keep a printed cheat sheet on the studio wall. Here is the current version, simplified for sellers who just want to know what to send.
| Platform | Main image aspect | Minimum longest side | Notable rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon (Seller Central) | Square (1:1) | 1600 px, 2000 px preferred for zoom | Pure white background (RGB 255/255/255), product fills ~85% of the frame, no props on main image |
| Shopify default grid | Square (1:1) | 2048 px | Consistent framing across the collection page so tiles align visually |
| Etsy | Wide 4:3, 2000 px on the long edge | 2000 px | Ten-image ceiling; the first image tends to perform better as a lifestyle shot than a cutout |
| WooCommerce | Configurable, usually square | Depends on theme, 1200 px safe floor | Set your theme’s image dimensions before uploading so nothing is re-cropped by WordPress |
| Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram) | 1:1, 4:5, 16:9 | 1080×1080, 1080×1350, 1920×1080 | Text overlay under 20% of the canvas for the cleanest delivery |
| Google Shopping / Merchant Center | Square or 4:3 | 800×800 minimum, 1600 px recommended | No promotional overlays, no watermarks, no borders |
The trap here is not the specs themselves; it is that most sellers try to satisfy them one platform at a time, re-shooting the same product two or three times. A properly planned session captures at a large enough master resolution to crop down into every one of those aspect ratios from the same set of frames, which is the entire reason a shoot day pays back multiple times over.
The deliverable set that covers every channel
Whether you sell candles, phone accessories, apparel, or CPG, the same eight-to-ten frames tend to satisfy every listing at once. Sellers who are used to receiving “just the whites” from an older provider are often surprised by how much more they get from a single studio day when the brief is written correctly.
The core set we plan against is a hero shot on white, three to four alternate angles (front, back, three-quarter, top-down for anything shallow), one packaging or size-reference frame, one detail crop of any material or texture that matters, and at least two lifestyle frames that show the product in context. When ads are in the budget, we add two square and one vertical variant framed with negative space for text overlay, which is what Meta’s placements need to breathe.
Six images can cover a straightforward Amazon plus Shopify listing where the brand is not running paid social. Ten images become necessary once Etsy’s ten-slot listings, Google Shopping’s multi-image support, and any Meta or TikTok creative slots are all in play. Beyond ten, you are usually shooting seasonal refreshes rather than the base set, which is a separate conversation.
Sellers who want the specific pixel dimensions per deliverable, plus how the estimate reflects the number of angles booked, will find that broken out in the 2026 rate card, which is the sanctioned source for pricing questions.
One Montreal studio day, many output sizes
The economic argument for ecommerce photography Montreal-side is that a single well-lit master frame, captured at 45 to 60 megapixels, can be cropped and resized into every one of the specs above without a re-shoot. That is what a studio day is actually selling: not the click of the shutter, but the setup, the colour discipline, and the file production that follows.
A typical day for a mixed-catalog seller looks like this. Morning is white-cutout capture, one product every eight to twelve minutes on average, working through the SKUs the client has prioritized. The camera is tethered to a colour-managed monitor so the client (in person or on a video call) can approve framing before we move on. Afternoon is lifestyle: the same products on backdrop rolls, on styled surfaces, or with a human hand model when scale is the story. Once capture is done, one master file per angle goes into the pipeline for cropping, background clean-up, and per-channel export.
For sellers based in the Montreal metro, sample drop-off and pickup happen at the studio, or we schedule a courier window. For clients elsewhere in Quebec (Laval, Longueuil, Trois-Rivieres, Quebec City), we work with regional couriers so samples arrive Tuesday, shoot on Wednesday, and everything ships back Friday. Out-of-province senders coordinate through Canada Post or Purolator on a similar rhythm.
Studio vs on-location for Quebec DTC brands
The studio-versus-on-location question is not aesthetic; it is practical. Most sellers save money and time in the studio, because we already have the softboxes, the sweeps, the tethering rig, the retouching computer, and a set of standard surfaces ready to go. On-location adds a half-day of setup and teardown, plus the cost of transporting lights and grip.
Studio wins when the products are small enough to ship, when the shot list is under about twenty-five SKUs, when you want consistency across a large catalog, or when the plan calls for pure-white cutouts (which are effectively impossible outside a controlled lighting environment). Our space in the Mile End and Saint-Henri corridor is set up for exactly that kind of throughput.
On-location wins in three specific cases. The first is when the product is too heavy or fragile to move, which applies to some furniture, industrial equipment, and food-service catalogs. The second is when the brand story is the workshop or the boutique itself, and the environment is part of the imagery. The third is when we are shooting a full lookbook that mixes product shots with a model in the client’s actual retail space. Any of those three can justify travel and setup; a straight ecommerce listing rarely does.
If you are still weighing the two, the pre-shoot prep checklist covers the sample-quantity and packaging questions that usually decide it.
Bilingual ecommerce photography Montreal for the Quebec market
Selling from Quebec means your product pages are going to be viewed in French, in English, and by the Office quebecois de la langue francaise. Sellers who plan for that from the start, rather than retrofitting alt-text after a compliance email arrives, save themselves a re-export cycle later.
On the alt-text side, every image we deliver ships with both an English and a French alt string in the metadata, written descriptively rather than as keyword strings. A sock listing image reads as “chaussettes en laine merinos, paire pliee sur fond blanc” in French and “merino wool socks, folded pair on white background” in English. Shopify, WooCommerce, and most modern platforms let you swap the alt per language when your storefront is bilingual, and that swap is meaningful for SEO on both language versions of the same product.
On the graphic side, any callout overlay we bake into a lifestyle image or an ad creative is delivered in two language versions rather than translated at export time. That way the French version does not end up hyphenated across two lines while the English version fits comfortably. For products that ship into physical Quebec retail (independent boutiques, IGA and Metro shelves, Simons for apparel), Loi 96 alignment on packaging photography matters too: the front-of-pack shot must show the French copy legibly for the listing to reflect what the buyer sees on-shelf. We flag this during briefing so nothing gets caught by a compliance review after launch.
The takeaway is straightforward: ecommerce photography Montreal sellers get the best return when a single planned shoot day is designed against every channel at once, delivered in bilingual metadata, and priced around the real deliverable count rather than the number of clicks. If your catalog spans marketplaces, our Amazon-specific listing image workflow and the deeper walk-through for WooCommerce store owners are the natural next reads once you have picked the platform mix that fits your business.
