Dealing with images of multiple products

Have any other retailers had this problem?

[jsglobal]

Hi. I was wondering if any of you have had experience suppliers who only provide images of their products shown in groups/collections? This, of course, is most relevant to marketers who use drop shippers and therefore don't have the ability to take digital images of the products themselves. It seems like in almost all retail sites, product pages consist of one title, image, description, SKU number, price, and order button per product. When multiple products are in the image, though, that's impossible (and, by the way, the products in the images are arranged in a way that they can't possibly be cropped or anything). If any of you have been in this situation, I'd be very interested in hearing how you dealt with it while maintaining clean and effective web pages. Thanks in advance.

[mivox]

Can you contact the manufacturer and ask them for product photos? I've had fairly good luck with special requests like that... especially when you send them a link to the page on your site where all their competitors' products have nice photos, and their items have a "photo not available" place-holder graphic...

Alternatively, if you have no luck with that, open up the 'collection' photo in an image editor and darken the image except for the one item you are describing... and perhaps also mark it with a red circle.

[vincevincevince]

or try typing the product name into a google images search

or try typing the product name into ebay

;-)

[korkus2000]

vincevincevince I assume you are kidding. I would caution anyone using images on their site that they took from another without written permission.

[mivox]

OTOH, if you find a product image on someone else's site, you can always email them and ask where they got it (from the manufacturer, or did they take it themselves).

If it is actually their photo, you could ask permission to use it... I've had luck with that tactic as well. :)

[vincevincevince]

korkus2000, I never mentioned not asking permission... was just pointing out ways of finding people with photos of the products as a starting point for obtaining one yourself ;-)

_{vincevincevince would like to make clear he is in full support of following copyright legislation}

[korkus2000]

Like I said I assumed that, just wanted to point that out to others reading. It is a good way to find other images as long as you do get permission.