Skeptical and overwhelmed with it at first…But now I think I am starting to love it! I did a wedding invitation as a test run with just a few images added and viewing it looks so much more inviting and informative for the customer. I think this is going to be a wonderful addition to the sack of tools Z gives us!
@ElizabethR - to remove a cover photo - open the Media Manager - and on the photo you want to remove, there should be three dots - click on them and the option to remove photo appears
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I’m just seeing this and reading about it. Is there an example I can see of how it will look ideally?
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I have mixed feelings about all of this! Months ago, before the official announcement about the covers, I realized that if one of my products sold and I put a cover photo on it, that product quickly sold again. This seemed good to me and all my best sellers got their covers quickly. The official announcement came confirming that it was good to do cover photos and since then it seems that I do nothing but do cover photos and more cover photos but very few new designs that also have their cover photos but this does not seem to be helping the sale, quite the contrary, my sales fall, fall and fall… Neither the cover photos seem to be useful, nor the titles, descriptions and labels that take me a long time to create… So, I must do now more cover photos and more descriptions? As? If I don’t, will it affect me? I’m not a team, it’s just me dedicating a lot of time and in the last few months results are much lower than in previous years. I’m not a newbie here but I have the feeling that I’m going back to square one again and again… And on the other hand I think that this new option can be very good to show small details of my designs that can go unnoticed and put a description about it at the bottom of the page. I think of a heart made of tiny hearts or of words that seem cut out of photographs, show it and tell it here it will be good for you. Well, that reminds me of my Etsy days with a cover photo and several enlargements of the same photo showing the details, I can do it. I also thought that this was easier to do with your phone while you wait, travel on public transport or any other time of the day away from your computer. 1- I can’t do that with my phone because the mobile version doesn’t show it, I have to switch to computer view and that’s usually quite uncomfortable. 2- Impossible to use the same photo and zoom on it. I guess I would have to re-upload the photo, which is not on my phone, and see the possibility of zooming. 3- I have used one of the new download options to try to load that photo and zoom in on it and be able to show the detail, I could not load that photo, quality PNG apparently, it refers to a server error. 3-I tried to put a photo caption and nothing happens, there is no new window to write or another option. There are three… but nothing happens either if I try to tap them, in fact it seems to tap the whole photo. Well, this was just a maybe bad or maybe a good idea… to take advantage of my time and this new Z resource and I haven’t been able to do anything at all or prove anything. Sorry for this long message and my bad English.
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Specifically to your point of adding cover photos to best-sellers in the marketplace, my approach has been not to tamper with what’s working. I’ve tended to make duplicates of my best sellers that are slightly altered or updated, or use a different key word approach, and then put cover photos on those. That way I haven’t rocked the boat on what is obviously working, and I’m ready to roll with a cover version too. For new items, I’m pretty much uniformly adding cover photos.
In general, I’m very excited about this feature, although I have to say I’m putting almost as much time into cover images these days as to adding new art. I also really like the caption feature under the photos.
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OH. MY. GOODNESS! This is F A N T A S T I C! This opens up so many opportunities… how to present the product, adding useful hints such as recommended image sizes, showing different pre-defined text styles, showing the whole unwrapped image in mugs, a.s.o…
PRECIOUS! LOVE, LOVE, LOVE IT!
Did I already mention, you are the best (don’t mind my little rants every now and then)?
P.S. Will check it out ASAP. One nice-to-have suggestion: it would be cool if we could define one mockup for the marketplace and a different one for collections and products. This way we can show beautiful insitu imagery on the marketplace and simpler product views in let’s say product collections and listings to avoid customers being overwhelmed and to facilitate navigation and choice.
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Thank you
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As I understood, we aren’t limited to purely illustrative mockups, so, yes, this is a good way to show customers different variants and give them hints on how to use - and customize - our designs. In your SVG example, you can let customers know that they can change the color within the design tool.
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You may be right, but the recommendation was to create cover photos, because this was going to be prioritized. So I did it. It is possible that in my case it has also influenced the fact that I am not very much in favor of downloads, (although I have to reconvert some designs so that they can be downloaded even if I do not like the idea of unlimited downloads or accept returns, for example) and that it is a cluster of circumstances. In addition to the fact that in general sales have dropped for many designers, as we can read here. In any case, I will also investigate this new tool, I find it interesting to be able to introduce photo captions and explain with our words some aspect that we want to highlight, but I also think that if I want to explain something on the back of my card design, creating a new scene will be redundant for the client because there is already a photograph of the back and it will also take up valuable time. Honestly, I am much more in favor of quality than quantity and I prefer to create one or two scenes of the best quality that I am capable of than ten that contribute nothing. But I don’t know how that is going to affect my positioning… And if it hurts me? Then I will have to do it. I don’t know, we’ll see how all this evolves according to the experience of each one.
I also think it would be very helpful to see a few good examples of this new Media Manager with actual good examples of how to best use it, including a few good examples of captions. A picture is worth a thousand words!
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@Wildart , just another couple of ideas. I’ve done very well with Photopea.com, as a photoshop alternative tool. It’s free, and another newer tool to me is here: https://tools.picsart.com/ for quick and easy background removal. Both are free, and Photopea gets updated with cool new tools every day. One particular feature that I like to use, for jewelry esp is doing a solid black background, so that the jewelry really stands out. Here’s my example: https://www.zazzle.com/victorian_rose_ephemera_earrings-256504924730400258 Hopefully you’ve got a good image with background removed to do this. But, it doesn’t matter that it’s cut off the top, if you try to do like my example.
A lot of designers here will say this, that there’s no need to go buy expensive software, because now, there’s so many free software programs online that are really good at removing backgrounds.
I’ve found that just blurring a background, and adding your product on top, does a beautiful job. As long as it has a sharp product image as the main feature, you’re good. Here’s an example of this: https://www.zazzle.com/american_football_sport_scrapbook_collector_album_3_ring_binder-127082252784950122
Hope this helps.
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Did anyone else wonder about the Media for the store that we had to complete? I was a little confused, if this would have anything to do with that. Maybe not right now, but in the future?
And thinking about this right off the top of my head, why not create different sizes so that we can also use them for social media? It does require a lot of additional graphic storage on our part, and anything to free up some time like this would be helpful to everyone! Plus our customers could actually pin or share these images on other social media!
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This is definitely an improvement, thanks.
So now we have to track all previously added cover photos to add a caption?
OMG, I see another huge pile of work coming my way …
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I have one current concern, since we need to so widely source insitus now.
Can it be a content management practice to NOT immediately delete entire product listings based on cover photo images - reason being - it’s been widely discussed in these forums that we’ve seen placeholder images, fonts, and artwork that people have legitimately purchased through POD art sites be “recalled” for an issue sorted out with rightful original owners, etc.
With 10 images available, that 's a lot of room for something like this to happen within those media/insitus/backdrops.
I’d hate for anyone’s products to be deleted entirely if a component of an insitu is what is being called into question.
Can the uploaded media/cover photos be what is removed and NOT an entire product listing if this happens?
I’m basing this request on the assumption that a designer has rightfully purchased/subscribed to a service offering insitu images, or using public domain images as backdrops or pieces of these cover photos (NOT as part of the actual product design itself). And also on the assumption that using a background image that you are NOT selling as part of the artwork does not typically “make up the primary value of the item being sold” - but also not quite trusting any artwork supplier to safeguard others from assuming they have copyrights after purchasing the same background at some point.
Hopefully what I’m trying to say makes sense?
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I will work through this thank you, I just tried background remover its pretty good thank you
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Sorry to all to post this twice (https://community.zazzle.com/t5/ask-a-question/new-media-manager-cover-photos/td-p/86085), but as this is the Zazzle sponsored post, I probably should have posted these questions here:
Questions: Does each image need to display the product? Can one image be used to show only part of the product? Can one be used that only displays a store logo and contact info? Can one use the ten to create a how to personalize type slide show? Those are the questions that come to the top of my mind at the moment…
PC
…
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What sort of things should we put in the caption field? Saying why the design is unique, or what it’s inspired by, seems too similar to the description field. Is this nevertheless what we’re meant to do? I have to admit. at first I assumed the caption field was like an ALT tag, which could be read out like an audio tag for people with visual impairments.
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Thanks for sharing the picsart site, there are quite a few tools there that look very promising, I am looking forward to trying them out.
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How is this different from a collection image?
Can I just upload a collection image instead of spending valuable designing time with this new hoop we all have to jump though?
Will we ever be able to download a product image on a transparent image?
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In the description that Z provides us, it says to use the 10 images to effectively tell the story of the product. I have understood that it is like putting your description in images and highlighting aspects that you want to highlight. Well, it may make sense. In the mobile version the description is hidden, you have to go look for it, I don’t think many customers do it and I think a large percentage of potential customers do their first search on their mobile and maybe save to favorites. But in any case, in the mobile version the footer is not visible either. It seems to only show up when you make the image big… So maybe we should only use it with keyword phrases for search, although it might be repetitive. I added a few images along these lines to this product yesterday, but I also don’t think it’s worth spending time re-posting an image with a mobile phone to mention the download in the footer. Maybe being able to add feet to Z scenes was an option. So I think I’ll use it if the product requires it. I will now caption all my cover photos.