For the vast majority of products successful online sales are heavily correlated to the quality of the images and video on the site.

It follows that successful and efficient management of your website’s product images can be a major contributor to your site’s success. As we’ve listed here before, it’s definitely a critical factor in determining the quality of your product videos.

It used to be Image Management was exculsively the realm of photographers and graphic designers, however with more tools being made available for free and online use, this is no longer the case.

Today any ecommerce professional so desiring can efficiently, manage, edit and work collaboratively, with his or her website’s product images, using only free tools, and more specifically Google’s Picasa and Picasa Web Albums service.

The underlying logic for selecting Picasa is this:

It’s Free, excellent, and hooks up to a reliable backup…

Picasa is "built-in backup"

Managing and arranging images

Picasa Web tools is a full featured photo management solution backed by a powerful and FREE software suite, both owned and maintained by Google.

There are a bunch of things you can do with your photos using only Picasa’s web interface:

• Organize and label photos and albums
• Set sharing rules and notifications
• Provide geo-location for images
• Edit images
• Collaborate with others

Picasa is great for product image gallery management

Collaborative work

Picasa’s full integration with all of Google’s other products, and the availability of Commenting for the images on the web, makes collaboration easy and intuitive:

Editing images

There are many types of tasks you might want to accomplish with your images, but it’s safe to bet Resizing and Cropping are going to be at the top of the list…

Resize/crop:

Identifying site image size
Start by identifying what size you need to crop/resize your photos to.

If you’re not sure go to any product page, right-click on the main product image, and save-as. Now check your downloaded image’s properties to identify it’s size. Alternatively if you’re browsing with Chrome you can simply right-click and select Inspect element to reveal the product image size via the Metrics tab:

Identifying image size with Chrome

Entering resize values
When resizing match your site’s smallest value (width or height) to that of the edited image:

Resizing product images with Picasa

Cropping
Set your crop area by dragging or setting constraints for shape and size:

Cropping images with Picnic

Whatever edit’s you make don’t forget to Apply and Save your work before closing down Picnic

Uploading to your site

An important tip to remember for keeping your photos in order, is to associate all the images for a particular product or category in a single folder. This works well when you want to batch download photos for work on your local machine:

The ability to download entire albums at a time is a HUGE time saver

…and just as well when you want  to upload/update the photos on your site (see below).

Naming and locating images 
For extra SEO value it’s well worth your while to give all your product images meaningful names (i.e. avoid file names like prod-123.jpg, instead go for descriptive names like professional-makeup-remover.jpg). Finding image folders to accomplish tasks like this is easy via Picasa’s desktop solution:

Locate your product album by right clicking the album name in your desktop version of Picasa, and selecting Locate on Disk

Tracking product photos is easy

Easy upload
Uploading and updating images to your website’s backend is now simply a matter of following these steps:

1. Access your product’s Image Management console via your shop’s backend (shown here: Magento – details on how to manage Magento product pages can be found here)
2. Browse to find the correct image folder
3. Select the images you want upload
4. Click Open
5. Click Upload and save your changes

Updating product photos is easy when they're kept in order

Cool Bonus!

It also enables you to take advantage of Picasa’s video creator to make videos for your products and upload them to Youtube:

Picasa enables you to make product videos for Youtube pubilcation

More on that here:

The first rule of Video is you don't talk about Video!

JUST PRODUCE IT!

Now that I’ve paraphrased both Fight Club and Nike I guess it’s time to explain:

The point I’m going to make in this post is that instead of procrastinating and postponing producing your first video, why not commit to:

Make your first video today!

Don’t spend a ton of cash on production. You can create decent quality videos by stitching together a few photos and adding in music and narration. There’s no need to buy any expensive software – you can produce video with free tools like Google’s Picasa or Videospin. Internalize these two simple facts:

Producing a single video these day is EASY and you can do it for FREE.

A narrated slideshow looks and feels like a video to your audience, and more importantly, has the same impact:

A 60 second product video based on a slideshow backed with narration simultaneously addresses the learning needs of different types of people. It WILL have a positive effect on your sales conversions.

These videos are effective because the voice-over narration attracts auditory learners – who absorb information best when hearing it ,while the visual cues, such as bullet point slides, work well with visual learners – who absorb information best when seeing and reading it.

For both types of learners the dynamic aspect of the video draws attention to the content because human eyes are designed to follow movement.

If you Embed it they will watch

Anyone care to guess where that movie reference comes from?

Actually it’s from a corny (literally – the movie is about a field of corn) Kevin Costner film that is very much in the “Just do it” spirit of this post.

The point of the reference is that once you have a video on your site it’s guaranteed your visitors will watch it (at least for a few seconds -whether they stick with you is a question of how compelling you are and how long your video is).

You may rightfully ask:

“O.K. But how do I get my video on my site?”

Well, there are a ton of ways to do this but I’m going to offer you just one - use YouTube.

It’s not that other options aren’t great, it’s just that I’d rather you get busy uploading than start procrastinating by comparing the pros and cons of different services. Not to mention YouTube is by far the most successful video service online today:

Get busy uploading!

1. Uploading a video to YouTube is free and simple.  Here’s a short clip explaining how it’s done:
2. Once you’ve uploaded your video to YouTube all you need to do is embed it on your site:

Congratulations, You’ve added your first video to your site!
What next?

Now that you have video on our site, it’s important to follow up by meticulously examining your site’s stats and check how your video enhanced pages  are performing.

Here are a two basic A/B test you should run:

• Page performance with video vs. without.
• Prepare another version of your video and compare performance for version A vs. version B

Ideally you should repeat this cycle continuously:

Shoot > Uploading > A/B test > Optimize > Shoot

Scale is an issue…

The time cost involved in committing to this type of effort for every product in your inventory tends to be such that, although you’ll definitely see results and increase your bottom line, at some point you wont be able to keep up. Especially if you’re inventory consists of more than just a few select items. That’s where Treepodia comes in. Our ecommerce video platform automates the entire process outlined in this post. We’ll boost your entire product catalog with auto optimized video enhancement in 24 hours or less. Furthermore we operate on a Pay-Per-View model guaranteeing that you’re only paying for videos your clients actually saw. Contact us now to learn more : )

Thanks to the Internet, everybody and his cousin can now star in his own production, using techniques straight out of the Hollywood playbook

Slide, Animoto and Masher – online slideshow tools

Animoto Online Video Slideshow Solution (image credit: mobology)

David then goes on to introduce a number of the online tools available for people who want to transform their photos into smart-looking videos accompanied by music or narration. David mentions Slide and Animoto, which I was familiar with, and Masher, which I’d never heard of before and found to be still slightly buggy.

What if I don’t like online services?

I think that although David’s suggestions are excellent, some people might find working exclusively with an online service slightly frustrating, especially if/when connectivity and speed are an issue. Personally, if your interested in making your own video slideshows, I’d recommend looking at Picasa, Google’s cool photo editing tool which is backed by a photo sharing service of the same name.

Picasa as a video slideshow tool

Picasa has a built in video tool that has excellent support for stitching photos together into a slideshow, and uploading it onto Youtube. This slideshow I created last month for Semantic Web startup Semantinet was done exclusively with Picasa. Check it out to get an impression of what you can expect:

So what are the pros and cons of using Picasa?

The pros are:

• It’s quick and easy to learn and use
• Ample support is available online via Picasa help forums
• You can connect your Picasa and Youtube uploads to your Gmail account (if you haven’t got a Gmail account yet, now’s the time to get one…)
• It’s completely FREE!

The cons are

• Picasa’s simplicity also means you’re offered rather limited customizing options
• Unlike with Animoto and Slide, you have to supply your own music (a great resource for this is FreeMusicArchive.org).

How scalable are these solutions for ecommerce?

If you’re a smal scale operation with only a few products in your store, and you’re only interested in testing what effect slideshow videos can have on your conversions rates, Picasa is a great tool to use and I’d definitely recommend it. For all other purposes however, Picasa still requires far too much human labor to make it effective. Serious vendors are probably best served by automated video solutions like our own, even for the pilot phase.