I’m using the Horizon theme. On my product pages, the first variant is automatically pre-selected when a customer arrives on the page. This causes the variant image (a color swatch) to appear first in the gallery.
What I want :
Customer arrives → sees the main cover photo first, then the other product photos in order (no variant pre-selected)
Customer selects size AND color → then the variant image appears in the gallery
Is there a way to disable the default variant pre-selection in Horizon so the gallery shows only the main photos on arrival ?
By default, Horizon selects the first available variant on page load, so there isn’t a built in setting to disable that behavior.
To confirm whether this can be adjusted with a small theme customization, could you please share your store URL? If your store is password protected, please include the storefront password as well.
That will allow us to inspect how your product gallery and variant picker are configured and suggest the best approach.
Hey
This is a really common one with Horizon since it auto-selects the first variant (and shows its image) on load.
There’s no toggle for it, so it takes a small code tweak. Two parts to it:
1. Stop the variant from being pre-checked — Horizon’s variant picker lives in the block files (look for something like product-variant-picker / variant-option). You’ll want to remove the default checked/selected state so no variant starts active, and make sure the JS doesn’t silently fall back to the first variant in the background (this catches a lot of people — the button looks unselected but the first variant is still active under the hood).
2. Show the main product image until a click — since no variant is selected, set the gallery to display the product’s featured image first, then let the variant image swap in on selection.
A couple of things worth doing:
Always duplicate your theme before touching variant logic — the picker is wired into price, image, stock, and add-to-cart, so it’s easy to break something on a live store.
Block “Add to Cart” until a variant is actually chosen, otherwise people can add the “nothing selected” state. A simple “Please select an option” message covers it.
If you’d rather skip code, some option apps (like Easify Product Options) let you leave an option unselected by default without editing the theme.
If you paste your product-variant-picker code here, I (or someone) can point at the exact line to change.
thanks,
