How to automate the creation of your product photographs & animations?
Innovations, linked to the automation of tasks in e-commerce, are multiplying. Chat bot, drone delivery, order processing automation... These innovations affect all areas of online commerce: from logistics to delivery to product photography. They are equally accessible for e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, as well as for e-retailers specializing in a sector of activity.
Automating product photo shoots: from logistics to marketing
Forbes magazine mentioned it at the end of 2017 in an article: “With e-commerce growing at such a pace, it seems inevitable that automation will play an increasing role in every aspect of the value chain.”. In this value chain: automating the creation of visuals of objects sold online. A process that can be carried out internally and that involves both marketing and logistics of your products. New innovations related to process automation are emerging for e-commerce. For example, Prisma is currently developing a content management platform, XSPACE.
New innovations for online commerce
It takes the form of a large domed structure, in which digitized objects are placed. In this structure, the lighting system is organized in rows and is adjustable, in particular to eliminate unwanted shadows from objects. Once the lights are adjusted, the cameras fire. They then capture visuals for 2D products and their 3D animations or even videos, visuals for jewelry and 3D models of the product. In a second step, they are uploaded to this content management platform called XSPACE.
Reduce the time it takes to put e-commerce products online
It is to respond to a Problem of time and production costs that this solution is developed. “Prisma allows businesses to streamline the process of uploading product images. But also product specifications thanks to automation. Managing this information on e-commerce sites such as Amazon and eBay is a major problem in the industry. Collecting images takes time, managing content is complex, and the whole process is expensive,” The co-founder of Prisma, Isaac Dallas, explained in May 2018 on the Illinois State University portal.
Higher image quality to increase revenue
He also added: “Managing and generating product content is really hard. But it's worth it. A study conducted by eBay showed that you can increase your revenue by 5% simply by having high-quality content.” Regardless of the type of product sold (goggle, furnishings, jewelry...), the process or product photography workflow, leading to the posting of visuals online, is therefore carried out in several stages. It starts when the products to be photographed or animated (logistics) are received and ends when they are put online on the e-commerce site. In the meantime, several steps exist to carry out a quality photo shoot, among the main ones:
- Sort and prepare references to be photographed
- Position and start shooting objects
- Export and classify the various image files
Democratising the automation of e-commerce photo shootings
Today, there are efficient and accessible solutions to Automate photo shooting. They thus make it possible to create, internally, various types of product visuals. This ranges from still photographs, to multi-angles, including 360° and 3D animations. “For more than fifteen years, we have been developing and equipping e-commerce players with our automated photo solutions. These are studios controlled by software that automates certain tasks during photo shooting. Our ranges adapt to each need and each product. Whether it is an e-commerce platform that needs to photograph 30,000 products per year or an online store specializing in the sale of products from jewelery ”, explains Laurent Wainberg, founder and manager of PackshotCreator.
Software-controlled product photos and animations
The functioning of these automated photo studios is simple and intuitive. The user can, from the camera control software, Automate image production. This involves creating profiles per object. Once the reference product is placed in the studio, the shooting and export parameters of the image file are stored by the packshot shooting software. These are the position memory with the ghost image, the opening of the camera or even the lighting system settings. “It is possible to create as many profiles per product as needed. Once configured, these profiles are used to automate the creation process, both for still photos and for 360° animations or 3D objects. This is a real time-saver, considering that a good part of the users of these studios are not professional photographers. We are trying to constantly innovate and, for example, have recently proposed the use of a cloud platform via our software to gather and sort all their files, in order to integrate them even more easily on their e-commerce site”, concludes Laurent Wainberg.
