Is there a way to disable aggressive image compression?

Technical Q&A
1

I’d like to over-ride the aggressive image compression Shopify applies to images.

Is there any custom code or tactics to do this?

Uploading png files did not help. My images have banding once I upload to Shopify, so I had to apply a lot of noise to the files to eliminate the banding, but now the images look rather noisy.

Krown Highlight Theme.

Cheers.

2

Can you share a link to some of your images? Your store?

I’d say there is no control over compression.

You can control the image size though (need to modify your theme) and serve images bigger than needed to let the browser scale them if this will help…

Finally, it’s possible to store images elsewhere (sirv or alike), but it’s a pain to implement and manage.

3

Thanks Tim.

store: www.schafskincare.com

I’ve tried uploading png images 2x the suggested size the theme developer suggests, and there’s still banding. I can only eliminate the banding by adding a lot of noise, but then the images look noisy. So it’s one or the other… Shopify compression seems to be the culprit here. It’s either the banding or the noise - both of which are issues for me, which is very frustrating.

4

Yes, I can see the noise on background and banding on white caps.

Uploading bigger file would not do much without theme modification – theme decides how to resize the image.

And even with oversized images the banding is still visible.

Unfortunately, I have no further recommendations – my perfectionism is not that evolved in the area of images.

Yours are good for me – I, personally would not bother improving them further and they are probably not a deciding factor in purchasing decision for your products (IMHO).

As I said, possible further improvements in image quality would be too costly.

5

Thanks Tim… I’m kinda leaning that way as well… it remains frustrating to spend so much effort on creating images, only to have them appear on my site so degraded.

I see other websites with incredibly detailed imagery - almost guaranteed to be non-Shopify store - and it disappointing there’s nothing I can do about it.

Be well.