Photo Studio Q&A: Learn to create high-quality eCommerce images with the Square Photo Studio app 📸

[Tom]

✨Your products are ready for their closeup!✨

What: We recently updated the Square Photo Studio app with additional styling features including shadow editing, level editing such as exposure and contrast, and the ability to change your images layout through size, position, and rotation tools. The app enables you to sync a photograph with your Square items or create links for your social media channels that let your followers shop directly on Facebook and Instagram.

Who: @johnobc on the Square Photo Studio product team answered questions about the app, and addressed feedback from sellers on how it's going with the app so far.

When: This Q&A took place on Wednesday, April 27, at 1:00pm PDT / 4:00pm EDT. 

A few example questions:

• What are the tips and tricks to getting the perfect photo with Square Photo Studio?
• If I could do "_______" with Photo Studio, that would make setting up my inventory so much easier.
• How do I turn a photograph into a shoppable link?
• What’s the best way to use the different style options in the app?

Note: We can't share specific details on our product roadmaps, though this information will be helpful as we continue to make improvements.

[johnobc · Accepted solution]

Hello Everyone,

Thanks again for taking the time to share your questions and feedback!

I hope I was able to answer your questions and help with any photography tips —the experiences you've shared will also help us as we continue to iterate based on your feedback.

As we close out this event, we wanted to do a recap on three themes that came up frequently:

• Android support - it’s really helpful to see how many of you want an Android version of the app. Thank you again for posting here and letting us know the demand

• Photography tips for different items - there were a few specific questions about how to best photograph different items. If there’s a theme here it’s that using natural, even light, a neutral background, and reducing shadows will lead to the best results. Shadows end up being the enemy of our background removal model - so the more you’re able to fill in gaps around the product the better the app will perform. There’ll be improvements coming here soon as well!

• Text, logos, and watermarks - there were a few feature requests around adding text, logos, and watermarks to images. This is something we definitely want to do and the feedback here has been helpful to prioritize these features

We appreciate you taking the time to share your experiences and we'll continue to improve the Photo Studio app based on your business needs.   

For the latest updates, keep watch for announcements of new features in Product Updates and, if you’re using the app, make sure to turn on push notifications. We’re working to develop and add features pretty quickly and we’d love any feedback as you try out new versions!

[JKO]

Hi Tom,

I have been using the Photo Studio for a while to photograph my jewelry and there are a couple of enhancements I'd really like to see:

* The editing tool when removing or adding background is way too big and clumsy for things like fine lines on jewelry. Any progress on making the circle smaller and providing a way to control it better? 

* Sometimes (especially with jewelry wires or necklaces), I can tell that the app "sees" the wire, but it blanks it out anyway. I'd love a way to highlight an area of the photo and tell the app to "fill in what you see." 

* I have had some success photographing my pieces on a black background, removing the background, and then adding back in a black background. When I do this, however, the fine lines often have a "halo" around them. Any thoughts on how to correct this?

* I would also like to be able to use the editor to load photos into the image library and then add them to my items or vice versa. I often want to be able to reuse the images and currently have no options but to reload.

Thanks!

[johnobc]

This is great feedback!! Thanks for providing it and continuing to use the app. To answer some of your questions:

- We are likely not going to be investing more in the editing tool - we've found it's extremely difficult to do on mobile and it's a very hard problem to solve

- Instead, we've found it's better to focus the time on getting better background removal in the first place. To that end, we are exploring adding a 'jewelry' mode to the app which employs an alternative background removal model. TBD if or when we will add this but we have found a different background removal model that works better for minute detail. Would that help or do you still feel like you'd need the edit??

-I believe this should solve the halo effect you're seeing - you typically get the halo from the ML background removal 'missing' pixels when the item is run through it

- Love the image library idea - something we'll add to the list!

[JKO]

If the alternate background removal tool is good enough, I probably won’t need editing as well—but I wouldn’t be able to tell until I see it in action. I was a beta tester for the original version, let me know if there’s a way I can help both of us by checking out the alternative!

Thanks! Jan

[JKO]

Can you give me any idea when your enhanced background remove function might be available?

Thanks!

[johnobc]

We're still testing it so not for another few months unfortunately. We want to make sure it performs better against a wide range of use cases - but definitely something we're working on!

[JKO]

Sigh. Let me know if you need a beta tester. Also, a couple more things that would be helpful in the app:

* When you're editing near the top of the picture, the circle that shows you the closeup runs off the top of the page. Automatically adjusting the circle to be in the center of the screen would be helpful or allowing the user to move the location of the circle.

* When you use photo studio to add an item to the site and are typing the description, it doesn't allow you to insert a space between words if you go back to add something to the description. 

Thanks!