European Fashion Marketplace Image Requirements

The specs, side by side

Start with the hard numbers. Everything else in your workflow is downstream of these four rows.

Three details cause most of the avoidable failures:

• JPEG is not a suggestion. Zalando accepts JPEG/JPG only — no PNG, no WebP. If your DAM exports PNG by default for anything with a cut-out background, that pipeline will fail silently at the feed level.
• Minimums are lower than recommendations, and both matter. Zalando's floor is 762 × 1100 px, but designer-brand articles are held to a stricter 1800 × 2600 px. ASOS's floor is 1500 × 1900 px. Shooting to the recommended size, not the minimum, means one master survives every platform's downscale.
• File size caps bite late. About You caps at roughly 2 MB while Zalando allows up to 20 MB. A 2600 px sRGB JPEG at quality 90 will clear 2 MB on a textured garment. Compress per destination, not once.

Why the aspect ratios differ at all

These ratios are not arbitrary. Each marketplace picked a shape that fits its grid, and the grid is the product. Zalando's taller 1:1.44 gives full-length looks room to breathe in a dense category listing. About You's 3:4 is a mobile-native ratio that tiles cleanly in a feed-style browse experience. Breuninger's 1:1.37 sits between the two and pairs with generous padding to read as premium — the whitespace is the luxury signal.

The consequence for shooters: crop, not composition, is the variable. If you frame a look to sit perfectly inside 3:4, you have no headroom to extend into 1:1.44 — you will either letterbox or cut the shoes. The fix is to shoot loose.

Shoot your master at 1:1.5 or looser. Roughly 20% extra vertical room above the tallest requirement means every downstream crop is a subtraction, never an extension. Extensions are where generative fill artifacts creep in — stretched floor lines, duplicated shadow edges, a second heel appearing at the bottom of the frame.

The shot list all four platforms actually want

Underneath the spec differences, the editorial requirement converges. About You and Breuninger both mandate a minimum of four images with a defined sequence: packshot, model view, front crop, back crop (or side view where a back crop is not available). Zalando accepts up to seven images per variation and requires a minimum of three compliant images across most apparel, shoe, accessory and bag categories. ASOS requires on-model photography for clothing, with ghost mannequin permitted in some categories only with prior approval.

Build one shot list that is a superset of all four and you stop thinking about it per-channel:

1. Packshot / ghost mannequin — flat product on neutral, no model. Satisfies the mandatory packshot on About You and Breuninger and the first-position slot on Zalando.
2. Full-length front on model — the hero. Required by ASOS for all clothing.
3. Full-length back on model — covers the back-crop requirement when a dedicated crop is not shot.
4. Front crop — waist-up or garment-focused detail. Mandatory in the About You / Breuninger sequence.
5. Back crop or side view — whichever the garment supports.
6. Fabric / hardware macro — optional everywhere, but it fills Zalando's extra slots and reduces size-and-quality returns.

Backgrounds: the expensive difference

Aspect ratios are a crop. Backgrounds are a reshoot — unless you handle them in post. ASOS wants light grey near 240 RGB. Breuninger wants a specific beige-grey at RGB 248,243,237. About You wants plain light grey. Zalando expects clean neutral. Physically re-lighting a cyclorama to four different tones is not a realistic use of a shoot day.

The practical method: shoot everything on one evenly lit light-grey sweep with clean separation between garment and floor, then generate the platform-specific backdrop in post. Tools like Retouchable handle the background replacement and per-platform export sizing in the same pass, which matters because the crop and the backdrop have to be decided together — a 1:1.44 extension needs backdrop to extend into.

Two things to get right regardless of tooling. First, avoid shooting on the target colour. Matching 248,243,237 in camera and then having the marketplace's own compression shift it is worse than compositing to an exact value. Second, keep shadows real. A hard-cut garment floating on flat grey reads as catalogue filler; the contact shadow under the hem is what makes a composited backdrop believable.

A one-master export pipeline

The goal is a single approved master per shot, and a deterministic export step per marketplace. Once that exists, a spec revision is a config change, not a project.

Three rules keep this from degrading over a season:

• Never edit a derivative. If a marketplace flags an image, fix the master and re-export all four. Patching the Zalando file and not the ASOS one is how catalogues drift out of sync.
• Version the specs, not just the images. Zalando's guidelines were last revised in May 2026; ASOS distributes its aesthetic brief to approved partners and updates it. Store the spec values in a config file with a date, so you know which export batch used which rules.
• Validate before upload, not after. A pre-flight check on ratio, pixel dimensions, colour mode (sRGB) and file size catches the great majority of rejections at zero cost. Discovering the same problem through a marketplace review queue costs weeks.

Common rejection reasons and how to pre-empt them

Most rejections are not creative judgments. They are mechanical, predictable, and cheap to prevent.

The pattern is consistent: every one of these is a process fix rather than a photography fix. Fashion marketplaces are not asking for better pictures — they are asking for pictures that slot into their grid without a human having to look at them. Meet the spec mechanically and the creative work gets judged on its merits.