Product photos — shown whole, never cut off

A wide or tall photo used to be cropped to fit its frame. Auto now shows it whole; choose Fill the frame or set it for one product.

3 min readUpdated 8 Oct 2026

In this guide

Every design shows a product photo inside a frame of a fixed shape — a square on most product cards, a taller frame on fashion designs. A photo that is wider or taller than its frame used to be cut off at the edges to fill it: a wide photo of a cooking pot lost its handles, a tall photo of a kurti lost its hem. Product photosin Settings → Appearance → “What customers see” lets you choose how photos meet their frames, and the default Auto shows every photo whole without you doing anything.

Auto — the default

Auto looks at each photo’s shape and the frame it goes into. A photo that is close to the frame’s shape fills it edge to edge, exactly as before. A photo of a clearly different shape — wider or taller — is shown wholeinside the frame, with a little of the frame’s background showing at the sides or above and below. Nothing is cut off.

On the product page the big photo frame goes one step further: it takes the shape of the product’s first photo (between a tall 3:4 and a wide 16:9), so a wide photo gets a wide frame and a tall photo a tall one. When most of your photos share one shape, the product cards take that shape too, so your grid stays even and the photos fill it without cropping.

Auto changes nothing for a photo that already fits its frame. Shops with square photos on a square design look exactly as they did.

The three choices

Auto (recommended) — as described above: fill when the shapes match, whole otherwise.
Show the whole photo — every photo is shown complete inside its frame, always. A wide or tall photo leaves a little space at the sides.
Fill the frame — every photo fills its frame edge to edge; the parts of a wide or tall photo that do not fit are cut off. Pick this if you prefer the look of a full frame and your photos are shot for it.

The shape of the product card frame

Below the three choices you can also pick the shape of the product card frame: Auto (the catalogue decides, as above), the design’s own shape, Square, Tall (3:4) or Wide (4:3). Choose Tall when your photos are phone shots of clothing; choose Wide when they are landscape catalogue shots. The product page frame is not affected by this — it follows each product’s own first photo.

One product, its own way

Open the product in Products and look under its photos:How these photos fit their frame lets this one product show its photos whole or fill the frame, whatever the site setting says, and Photo frame on the product page gives its product page a square, tall or wide frame. Product cards on the shop page keep the site-wide frame shape so the grid stays even.

When does it show on the website?

A change in Settings → Appearance goes live with the next publish of your website, like every other appearance setting. A choice made inside one product goes live when that product is saved. Photos you upload from today are measured as they arrive; older photos are measured in the background within a day, and until then the design shows them as it always did.

Questions

Why is there a light band above and below some photos?

That is the frame’s background showing because the photo is wider than the frame and is being shown whole. If you would rather have the frame filled, choose Fill the frame — or, for one product, set it in the product’s own form.

Will Auto make my grid uneven?

No. Every product card on a page uses the same frame shape; only what happens inside the frame changes per photo. The frame shape changes for the whole site at once, and only when most of your photos share one shape or you choose a shape yourself.

Can I go back to how it looked before?

Choose Fill the frame and the design’s own shape. That is the look every design had before this setting existed.