Using a single image across multiple products without duplication

Retired Boards Appdev Store Design
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It is so annoying that Shopify does not allow the use of a single image across multiple products without a duplicate being created. This would benefit so many stores that want to use an image to maybe promote or display something that is common to several products. It would allow the setting of a single Alt tag and allow the updating of a single image that would replicate to all the products that are using this image. Even if you select the URL for the image and add to a new product Shopify creates a duplicate filling up the files view.

I have a single image that I use on numerous products and therefore have hundreds of a duplicate of a single image, if I want to update this image I have to go to every single product that uses it and manually update each one, come on Shopify there has to be a solution that doesn’t involve this and will let us use a single image and then only have to update a single image when we want to update it.

This was reported years ago and Shopify have just ignored it and don’t give any update or response, poor support for something that so many people have reported on.

1 Like
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Hi Familycrafts,

I do understand this limitation of how images are used across products, and this issues around not being able to reuse images without making a duplicate on the Shopify CDN. I’ve connected with the product team on this to see if they can recommend any workarounds to improve this experience.

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Hi Liam

Thanks for the response but this has been requested several times over a few years and nothing has been done, actually not even a response from Shopify about it. I am at a loss as to what workaround you can possibly be thinking when the system creates duplicates when an image is used more than once. Surely this is more of a design issue that Shopify should take onboard and look towards supplying a fix to allow this. Surely you can see the benefit to allow a single image to be used multiple times without being duplicated, at the very least allowing this single image to be updated instead of spending hours going through every version of this identical image and changing each one out manually when you want to update it.