Users are encountering Shopify’s 128-item limit for metafield dropdown definitions, which is blocking their ability to categorize products effectively.
The Problem:
Multiple merchants need to exceed this limit (examples: 140 producers, 180+ values needed)
Shopify’s documentation doesn’t clearly communicate this constraint upfront
The limitation affects product filtering and search functionality
Current Status:
No confirmed workaround has been shared
One user suggests an experienced developer might be able to create custom metafields with higher validation limits, but this remains unverified
Multiple participants are seeking solutions, indicating this is an ongoing, unresolved issue
The discussion remains open with no concrete resolution provided.
Summarized with AI on October 31.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
So we’ve been building a site making use of metafields to differentiate thing like colour, producer, region of production etc on our website. This has been going fine up until a point, and recently we learned that you can only add 128 definitions into a metafield.
For example, we’ve got 140 producers for our products, and people tend to search specifically by producer. We are a at a loss as to what to do regarding getting the remaining 12 producers into the site!
We ran into this problem, too. Shopify documentation is poor in that it does not tell you there is a limit of 128 items when you want to save values in a dropdown list of a metafield.
We have the same problem, we need like 180. 128 is such an arbitrary number. . . I think there is a way for an experienced dev to create a new metafield with a predefined validation option limit that is higher.