Pan-European product imaging at scale for a London luxury eCommerce
A London based online retailer selling into all of Europe needed an image and metadata engine that could handle 60,000 product assets a year across many brands and categories. PixelPhant built a production pipeline that handled image variants, localized captions, accessibility metadata and marketplace exports. Result: faster publishing, higher discoverability across European search and marketplaces, and measurable commercial uplift.
Client snapshot
- Headquartered: central London, UK.
- Business model: direct to consumer retail across Europe, plus third party marketplaces.
- Annual catalog scale: 60,000 published product assets per year.
- Categories: apparel, footwear, home, beauty, electronics, accessories.
- Contributors: 40 contracted photographers, 15 brand partners, internal merchandising and marketplace teams.
Key challenges
- Massive asset variance. Photographers and brands delivered mixed file types, inconsistent naming, and varied crop and lighting styles.
- Localization need. Product pages required language specific image captions, localized color names, EU size conversions and regional image variants for seasonal marketing.
- Marketplace compliance. Different EU marketplaces and marketplaces in UK required different crop ratios, aspect ratios and metadata formats.
- Image SEO and AEO readiness. Images needed structured metadata and alt text templates so search engines and answer engines could index and surface product images.
- Time to market pressure. Seasonal collections and flash drops required same day publishing for priority SKUs.
- Finance and operations friction. Daily micro invoices and ad hoc corrections created a backlog for accounts and operations.
What we built – a high level summary
PixelPhant delivered a single operational system that accepted raw photography, turned it into publishable multi-variant assets, enriched images with localized metadata, validated marketplace rules, pushed derivatives to CDN and marketplace endpoints, and produced consolidated month end invoices.
Core components:
- Automated intake and filename normalization.
- Variant generator for colorways, size images and lifestyle crops.
- Localized caption engine that produces alt text and short captions in 12 EU languages.
- Export templates for major EU marketplaces and local retail feeds.
- Product image SEO layer with structured data generation and image sitemap automation.
- Priority lane for same day publishes and live revision sessions for hero SKUs.
- Consolidated postpaid billing and detailed monthly reporting.
Detailed solution
1. Automated intake and harmonization
- One ingest point via SFTP and dashboard. Every upload triggers automated checks for resolution, color profile, and filename format.
- File names get normalized to a SKU anchored convention: <merchantcode><sku><view>_<sequence>.jpg.
- Unsupported file types are converted to high bit depth TIFF intermediary for consistent processing.
2. Variant and derivative engine
- From a single master capture we generate: packshot crops, hero banner crops, mobile-first crops, square marketplace images, and close up detail crops.
- Colorway variants are created by tagging the master with sku_variant codes and applying LUTs tuned to the brand color palette.
- For apparel we generate size guide overlays and model-to-product mapping images as separate derivatives.
3. Localization and metadata enrichment
- Language templates for alt text and short captions in EN, FR, DE, ES, IT, NL, SV, PL, PT, RU, NO, DA. Each template follows the brand tone and includes SKU and colorway words for SEO.
- EU size conversions and measurement overlays are generated automatically when the SKU requires it.
- Product attribute enrichment: fabric, finish, hardware, care instructions pulled from the merchant DMS and attached to image metadata.
4. Marketplace validation and export
- Each export template enforces marketplace rules: pixel dimensions, maximum file size, color profile, crop focus, background transparency rules.
- Non compliant assets are put into a corrective queue with error reasons and auto suggested fixes.
- CSV feeds mapping final filenames to SKU and product id are generated automatically for bulk imports.
5. Image SEO and AEO readiness
- We inject structured data blocks (schema.org Product and ImageObject) for each published asset with localized descriptions.
- Image sitemap entries are generated and pushed to the merchant sitemap index with high priority for new hero assets.
- Alt text templates incorporate primary keywords, colorways and use short readable sentences to support search snippet generation.
Example of an alt text template:
- English: “Mens running shoe – navy white – breathable knit upper – SKU 12345”
- French: “Chaussure de running homme – marine blanc – empeigne respirante – SKU 12345”
6. Live revision and priority publish
- For hero SKUs the dashboard supports live collaborative fixes. Creative lead annotates the image, retoucher applies the change and a new derivative is reissued to the CDN within minutes.
- Priority requests for up to 200 hero SKUs a day are supported with a 4 hour SLA.
7. Governance, logging and consolidated billing
- Every operation is logged with user id, timestamp and original filename.
- Visual hash is used to detect duplicates and prevent double processing and double billing.
- Monthly consolidated invoice shows counts by spec, channel exports and priority sessions. Detailed CSVs support finance reconciliation.
Implementation timeline
- Discovery and sample audit: 7 calendar days scanning 5,000 representative files.
- Ruleset and template build: 10 calendar days to author LUTs, alt text templates and marketplace exports.
- Pilot run: 14 calendar days processing 6,500 assets to validate pipelines and localizations.
- Production scale up: full roll out in 30 days with staging for seasonal peak weeks.
Performance and results
Measured outcomes within the first 90 days:
- Assets published per day increased from 160 to 640 on average, a 300 percent uplift.
- Time from photographer upload to live SKU reduced from 48 hours to 6 hours for standard SKUs, and to 90 minutes for priority hero SKUs.
- Organic image search impressions for product images rose 42 percent month on month after structured data and sitemap deployment.
- Conversion rate on pages with localized image captions improved 14 percent compared to control.
- Marketplace rejection rate for images fell by 82 percent.
- Finance reported a 90 percent reduction in time spent on image invoice reconciliation due to consolidated monthly billing.
Real examples of fixes we did
- Created multilingual alt text and caption set for a 1200 SKU footwear drop in 6 EU languages and generated all marketplace derivatives with matching filenames and CSV for bulk upload.
- Repaired color mismatch across three photographer workflows for a premium handbag line by building a color reference library and applying per-photographer LUTs.
- Automated a size conversion overlay for EU to UK sizing on apparel images to reduce buyer returns for size mismatch.
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