Taking a lot of product photos at once, whether you’re updating your listings or creating new ones, can be hugely time consuming, but in this post I’m going to give you some awesome timesaving tips for DIY product photography.

The key to quickly get those product photos ready for your listings is preparation.

1. Plan

The planning phase of the photoshoot is the most important in ensuring a quick workflow. Planning involves know exactly what photos of each product you need, gathering your props, setting up your shooting space, and double checking your equipment to make sure it’s in working order.

Hot tip: Set aside an entire day/afternoon of undisturbed time to make this happen. By focusing a block of time on updating the photos in your listings, you’ll save loads of time in the long run by not having to re-focus your brainspace every time, re-doing your setup, bringing your props back out, etc.

2. Take your photos sequentially

Once you’ve planned your photoshoot, including background, props, shot list, etc, and you’ve got your block of time set aside, it’s time to start taking those photos. You want to take your photos sequentially, ie, photograph all images of all product in one setup, before moving onto the next setup.

Example: You make jewelry. You’re going to take roughly the same images of each of your pieces for the sake of cohesiveness, right?

So what you’re going to do is set up the scene for the first shot (perhaps your main image), then shoot all of your product on that setup one after another. This should go fairly quickly. If you are going to take several shots on that background, do them now. For example, the product in it’s entirety, three different angles, one close up detail shot. Done. Next product.  

Then, prepare your setup for the next shots (styled shots perhaps). Shoot them all at the same, simply swapping out the pieces.

And that is how to photograph a lot of photos in a short period of time.

That’s great! But what about editing them all? That’s gotta take forever right?

Nope.

3. Edit for a quick workflow

If you use Lightroom (which is an awesome program for quickly and efficiently editing photos), you can all of the same images in one set with just the click of a button.

Let’s take all of those main image photos you just took. They all have very similar tones, right? Same basic colours, same background, and in need of the same editing tweaks. You can edit the first photo in that set (adjust the tones and the colour balance), and then select all the photos in that set (by shift+clicking on the last photo in the set). Once you’ve selected all of the photos you want to apply the edit to, simply click the “Sync…” button below the Develop panel and click “Check All” to select all of the edits you want to copy to the others photo. Click “OK” and bam! All of those photos are now edited. Slick. Fast.

Also with Lightroom, you can very quickly export all of the photos you’ve just edited by making sure they’re all selected and then export them. At that time you can set the size you want them all to be. They’ll all be saved at once and ready to be uploaded to your shop.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right?