Product image requirements by channel

The single biggest fork: overlays allowed or not

If you remember one thing about channel image rules, make it this. Some channels treat the product image as a clean catalog photo and forbid promotional graphics on it. Others treat the image as ad creative and welcome badges and overlays. Mixing those up is the fastest way to get products disapproved or to leave performance on the table.

Google Shopping and Microsoft Shopping are in the clean-photo camp: no text overlays, no badges, no watermarks, no promotional graphics on the main image. Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest are in the creative camp: overlays and badges are allowed and frequently help. Every other format detail sits underneath this one decision.

Google Shopping and Microsoft Shopping

Both engines render product listings in their own UI and want a clean product photo to work with. Promotional overlays are not allowed on the main image, and a violation typically disapproves the product. Express sales through structured fields, not pixels.

• No promotional text, badges, watermarks, or call-to-action graphics on the main image.
• Show the actual product, accurately, usually on a plain or simple background.
• Communicate sales via the sale_price field; the channel draws the discount tag itself.
• Use a high-resolution image; larger square images render well across surfaces.
• Avoid placeholder, generic, or no-product images.

Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest

These channels show the product image as creative in feed, so overlays and badges are allowed and often lift click-through. The freedom comes with taste rules: keep overlays uncluttered, do not bury the product, and stay on brand. TikTok adds a specific limit worth repeating: you may not reproduce TikTok's own official badges or labels, so any badge you render must clearly be your own.

• Sale badges, discount overlays, branded frames, and backgrounds are permitted.
• Keep overlays minimal and legible at small sizes; do not crowd the frame.
• Use platform-appropriate aspect ratios for feed, stories, and reels placements.
• On TikTok, never imitate official TikTok Shop badges, tags, or labels.
• Make badges clearly your brand, not platform chrome.

Format and quality basics that apply everywhere

Underneath the overlay question, the universal rules are about clarity and fidelity. Every channel wants a sharp, correctly cropped, accurate image, and most reject tiny, blurry, or misleading photos. Strip EXIF and GPS metadata on output, cap decoded dimensions to avoid decompression issues, and never overwrite a live image URL that a channel may have cached.

• Use sufficiently high resolution and a clean, accurate crop.
• Avoid blur, heavy compression artifacts, and misleading edits.
• Strip source metadata (EXIF/GPS) from generated images.
• Serve images from stable, immutable URLs; publish a new URL rather than overwriting a cached one.

One product, multiple compliant images

The practical consequence of all this is that a single product needs more than one image: a clean one for Google and Microsoft, and a badged one for the social channels. Maintaining those by hand across a catalog is unworkable, which is why the rendering should be rule-driven inside the feed pipeline.

MartechFlow applies channel rules as part of the export. You define the creative once, and the pipeline ships the clean image to the shopping engines and the badged image to the overlay-friendly channels, every refresh, without you tracking which photo is allowed where.