You have shot a great product photo, edited it carefully and resized it to the right dimensions. Then you click Export, accept whatever JPEG settings your software offers, and quietly throw away some of that work. Red text on packaging turns fuzzy, fine fabric texture smears, and file sizes swing between 150 KB and 4 MB for no obvious reason.
JPEG is still the format almost every marketplace prefers for product uploads, so the few settings in the export dialog matter more than most sellers realise. This guide explains the three that make the biggest difference: quality, chroma subsampling and progressive encoding. It also covers what to pick for Shopify, Amazon, Shopee and Lazada.
Why JPEG export settings still matter in 2026
You might assume marketplaces recompress everything anyway, so your settings do not matter. Half true. Shopify, Amazon, Shopee and Lazada all re-encode your uploads, and Shopify's CDN will serve WebP or AVIF to browsers that support it. But every one of those conversions starts from your file. Detail you destroyed at export cannot be recovered later, and artefacts you introduced get compressed a second time, which usually makes them worse.
The goal is simple: upload a clean, high-quality master that survives one more round of compression, while staying under each platform's file size limit.
Setting 1: Quality
The quality slider controls how aggressively JPEG discards fine detail. The scale is not standard between programs, which causes a lot of confusion:
- Photoshop Save As uses 0 to 12.
- Photoshop Save for Web (Legacy), Lightroom, GIMP and most online tools use 0 to 100.
- Developer libraries such as Pillow and sharp also use 0 to 100, with defaults of 75 and 80 respectively.
A "quality 80" in one program is not guaranteed to match "quality 80" in another, so judge by the result, not the number.
Where the sweet spot sits
For product photos, file size climbs steeply above roughly quality 90 while visible improvement almost disappears. Below about 70, you start to see blocking in smooth gradients (such as the soft shadow under a product on a white background) and ringing around sharp edges. In practice:
- Master upload to a marketplace: 85 to 92. The platform will recompress, so give it headroom.
- Images served directly on your own site without a CDN that converts formats: 75 to 82 is usually fine.
- Thumbnails and email images: 70 to 80, because they are viewed small.
Avoid quality 100. It can be two to three times larger than quality 90 with no difference you can see on a phone screen, and it may push you over upload limits.
Setting 2: Chroma subsampling (the hidden culprit)
This is the setting most sellers have never heard of, and it explains a very common complaint: "Why does the red logo on my product look blurry when everything else is sharp?"
JPEG stores brightness (luma) and colour (chroma) separately. Because our eyes are much more sensitive to brightness detail than colour detail, JPEG can store colour at lower resolution to save space. That is chroma subsampling, and it is written as a ratio:
| Setting | What it does | File size | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4:4:4 | Full colour resolution, no subsampling | Largest (often 10 to 20% bigger) | Saturated colours, coloured text, logos, fine coloured patterns |
| 4:2:2 | Colour halved horizontally | Medium | A compromise, rarely offered in simple tools |
| 4:2:0 | Colour halved horizontally and vertically (a quarter of the colour data) | Smallest | Natural photos with soft colour transitions |
When 4:2:0 hurts product photos
Subsampling causes trouble wherever a strong colour meets a sharp edge. Typical victims include:
- Red, blue or magenta text and logos on packaging
- Thin coloured stripes or checks on clothing
- Neon and fluorescent products
- Infographic images with coloured icons, labels and callouts
- Colour swatch images, where the edge between two swatches bleeds
The edges look soft or carry a faint coloured halo, and the problem gets worse after the marketplace recompresses your image.
What your software does by default
- Photoshop chooses subsampling for you based on quality. In Save for Web, quality 51 and above is reported to use 4:4:4, while 50 and below uses 4:2:0. In Save As, the switch happens between levels 6 and 7.
- GIMP lets you choose under Advanced Options. Its own documentation notes that 4:4:4 preserves borders and contrasting colours best.
- Pillow (Python) and sharp (Node.js) default to 4:2:0. Developers can pass
subsampling=0in Pillow orchromaSubsampling: '4:4:4'in sharp. - Squoosh exposes the option in its MozJPEG advanced settings.
- Phone cameras usually save with 4:2:0, which is another reason to re-export carefully rather than uploading straight from the camera roll.
A practical rule: use 4:4:4 for hero images, infographics and anything with coloured text, and accept 4:2:0 for lifestyle photos and thumbnails where file size matters more.
Setting 3: Baseline vs progressive
A baseline JPEG loads top to bottom. A progressive JPEG loads a blurry version of the whole image first, then sharpens in passes. Two benefits for sellers:
- Perceived speed: shoppers on slow mobile connections see the whole product immediately rather than a half-drawn image.
- Smaller files: for images above roughly 10 KB, progressive encoding is commonly 2 to 10% smaller at identical quality. Very small thumbnails can come out slightly larger, so baseline is fine there.
Every major browser and marketplace accepts progressive JPEGs. If your tool offers "Optimised" or "Optimise Huffman tables", tick that too; it trims file size without changing a single pixel.
Two more settings to check
Colour profile
Export in sRGB and embed the profile. Adobe RGB or Display P3 files often look dull or shifted after marketplaces strip the profile during processing. This one setting prevents a lot of "the colour was different from the photo" returns.
Metadata
Stripping camera EXIF data saves a few kilobytes and removes GPS location from photos taken on a phone. Keep the colour profile, though, and make sure the image is physically rotated rather than relying on an EXIF orientation tag, or it may display sideways after upload.
Recommended settings by platform
| Platform | Typical upload limit | Suggested quality | Subsampling | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | 20 MB, up to 5000 x 5000 px | 85 to 90 | 4:4:4 for hero images | CDN converts to WebP or AVIF, so start from a clean master. 2048 x 2048 px is plenty for zoom. |
| Amazon | 10 MB | 85 to 92 | 4:4:4 | Longest side 1000 px or more enables zoom; 2000 px or more is a safe target. sRGB, JPEG preferred. |
| Shopee | Around 2 MB per image | 80 to 88 | 4:4:4 if under the limit | 1:1 at 1024 x 1024 px or larger. Watch the size cap on detailed images. |
| Lazada | Around 3 MB per image | 80 to 88 | 4:4:4 if under the limit | Square images between 330 x 330 and 5000 x 5000 px; 1000 x 1000 px or more recommended. |
| Your own site (no CDN conversion) | Aim for under 200 KB | 75 to 82 | 4:2:0 for lifestyle, 4:4:4 for text | Progressive on; serve sizes that match the display width. |
Marketplace limits change from time to time, so check the current seller centre help page before a large upload. If a detailed image will not fit under the cap at quality 85 with 4:4:4, drop the quality a few points before switching to 4:2:0, especially if the image contains coloured text.
How to test your own settings in five minutes
- Pick three typical images: a white background hero shot, an image with coloured text or a logo, and a lifestyle photo.
- Export each at quality 75, 85 and 92, with both 4:2:0 and 4:4:4.
- View them at 100% zoom and on your phone. Look at the soft shadow, the coloured edges and fine texture.
- Note the lowest setting where you cannot see a difference from the 92 version, and its file size.
- Upload that version to a test listing and check it again after the marketplace has processed it.
Once you have your numbers, write them down and use them for every batch so your catalogue stays consistent. If you are preparing images for several marketplaces at once, PixelPrep can resize and export a whole batch to each platform's dimensions in one pass, so you are not re-entering settings for every channel.
Quick checklist
- Export marketplace masters at quality 85 to 92, never 100.
- Use 4:4:4 chroma subsampling for hero images, infographics, logos and saturated colours.
- Turn on progressive encoding and Huffman optimisation for images above 10 KB.
- Convert to sRGB and embed the profile.
- Strip GPS and camera metadata, but physically rotate images first.
- Stay under each platform's file size cap by lowering quality slightly before giving up 4:4:4.
- Test once, record your settings, and apply them to every batch.
Getting these settings right takes a few minutes once, and it protects every photo you upload afterwards. Sharper logos, cleaner shadows and more accurate colour all help shoppers trust what they see, and that trust is what turns a click into a sale.