Images for online shops: product previews, sales, emails and ads from your catalogue

An online shop publishes the same few kinds of images over and over: the card that appears when someone shares a product, the sale post, the price drop, "back in stock", the coupon in the newsletter, the pin, the ad in five sizes. Each is a fixed layout filled from data your shop already has — name, price, old price, photo. With Shareglint those layouts become templates and your catalogue becomes the input, so the images follow the catalogue instead of a designer's queue.

This page is the overview for shops. The detailed how-to for product images is e-commerce product images; below are the jobs, the templates and the order to set them up in.

1. A link preview for every product page

When a product link is shared in WhatsApp, Messenger, Slack or a group chat, the preview shows the page's og:image. Many themes use the first product photo, cropped to 1.91:1 by each app in its own way. An auto OG URL fixes the whole catalogue with one tag: it reads each product page's title, description and image, and renders a branded card the first time a crawler asks for it (how auto OG works).

• Shopify: a snippet for the theme's meta-tags.liquid (Shopify page).
• WooCommerce: the same tag in WordPress (WordPress page).
• Other platforms: any theme that lets you edit the <head>.

An unchanged product is never charged twice, and tracking parameters do not create new images.

2. Campaign graphics from the catalogue

Sales, price drops, new arrivals and restocks are the posts a shop makes every week. Built-in templates cover them — product-sale, price-drop, new-arrival, back-in-stock, flash-sale, coupon-code, product-grid (up to four products in one image), gift-card — and every one renders in every size (og 1200×630, square 1080×1080, portrait 1080×1350, story 1080×1920, pinterest 1000×1500, youtube 1280×720), so one request gives the feed post, the story and the link card.

curl -X POST "https://shareglint.com/v1/images?wait=true" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "template": "back-in-stock",
    "sizes": ["square", "story"],
    "format": "jpeg",
    "modifications": { "product": "Trail Runner 2", "price": "$89", "image": "https://cdn.example.com/trail-runner-2.jpg" }
  }'

Wire it to your shop's events — a price change, a restock, a new product — through a webhook in your own code or an automation tool (integrations), and the post is ready when the event happens. JPEG is the safe format for social posts; Instagram's publishing API only accepts JPEG (Instagram posts).

3. The whole catalogue at once

For a seasonal sale across 800 products, export the catalogue as CSV — name, price, old price, photo URL, a SKU as filename — and send it as a batch with the sizes you need. Every product comes back as an image URL and all of them in one ZIP; after a price update, run it again and only the changed products render anew. Rows per batch by plan: Free 50, Starter 500, Pro 1,000, Scale 2,000, Business 5,000. The CSV guide covers the columns.

4. Pins, ads and emails

• Pinterest: product and listicle pins at 2:3 (Pinterest pins); Pinterest can auto-publish them from your RSS feed for a business account with a claimed website (Pinterest Help).
• Ads: one template per ad size and a batch per campaign, within each network's file limits — Google's uploaded display ads allow 150 KB, and sizes below our 200-pixel minimum edge (728×90, 320×50) are out (banner ads).
• Email: a signed image URL with the customer's name or coupon renders when the email is delivered, with no API call at send time (personalised email images).

The order to set it up in

Start where the payoff is biggest and the work smallest:

1. Link previews first. One tag in the theme, every product page covered, nothing to maintain. Share a product link in a chat afterwards and check the preview with the free OG checker.
2. Then the weekly posts. Pick two templates — usually a sale and a new-arrival card — set your accent colour and logo once, and render them from the product data whenever a promotion starts.
3. Then the seasonal batch. Before a big sale, render the whole catalogue in the sizes your channels need, and keep the ZIP for the campaign.
4. Last, email and ads. Personalised email images and ad variants pay off once the templates and data flow above are in place.

Where the images must not go

Google Merchant Center's image rules say the main product image must not include promotional text, watermarks or borders (Google Merchant Center), and marketplaces have similar rules. Keep your clean photos in feeds and marketplaces, and use the generated cards for link previews, social posts, ads where overlays are allowed, pins and emails.

What a shop typically renders

A worked example, to size the plan: a shop with 300 products, one new product and two promotions a week.

• Link previews: 300 cards once, then only new or changed products.
• Weekly posts: three posts in two sizes each, about 25 renders a month.
• A seasonal sale: 300 products in two sizes, 600 renders, once.

That is under 1,000 renders even in the month of the sale. The Starter plan has 2,000 renders a month for $9; the Free plan's 100 renders carry a watermark, which is fine for setting things up and not for customers (pricing). Repeats with the same values never count again.

What it does not do

• No native Shopify, WooCommerce or marketplace app: theme snippets, the API, CSV batches and automation tools are the bridge.
• No product photography, background removal or AI scenes; the template lays out the photo you give it.
• No posting to social networks or uploading to ad accounts — your scheduler and ad tools do that with the image URLs.

The templates for shops are in the e-commerce category of the gallery.