Comments on: PNG Product Images?

By: Jay

Jay — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:10:22 +0000

Great comments, all… this provides a lot of good insight

By: Fred

Fred — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:58:49 +0000

I use PNGs only for inclusion in Office documents, as they seem to resize nicer… such that even when they’re small, the text is often legible.

On a side note… Axure generates all its images as PNGs. No idea why.

By: Norman Orstad

Norman Orstad — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:16:23 +0000

I am sorry to say buy IE6 still demands transparency free images. Product shots are top priority if I was a ecommerce and lots of photosets I would say no to PNG!

By: Darrel

Darrel — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:59:23 +0000

Is there a specific feature in the PNG format that you would benefit from by making all of your product shots PNG files?

If not, odds are you can get smaller files by just sticking with JPGs.

By: Eric Caron

Eric Caron — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:57:16 +0000

For any image over 400×400 with a real-world color palette, I can’t understand why anything other than a high-quality (85% or greater) JPG would be used.

In a GIF vs PNG, PNG would be the reasonable choice for most cases. But for product images, using PNG introduces a lot of scary color oddities where the product may have different hues depending on OS/browser. For the most part, JPGs don’t have this issue (unless you’re dealing with automated color correction from CMYK to RGB). Since product images don’t have luxury that, for instance, a logo would, in terms of being slightly off color, I wouldn’t even remotely consider PNGs for this case.

By: Jake Freeberg

Jake Freeberg — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:03:59 +0000

I’m currently working on an e-commerce site and I think we’ll be using mostly PNG, but it’s also going to have a bunch of flash involved. I’m interested in hear how other people feel about it.