The Hard Specs: Size, Format, and URL Rules
Google's image_link attribute is required for every product in your feed, and it has to point to a stable, crawlable URL. Here are the numbers that matter.
| Requirement | Current rule | What to actually use |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum size (non-apparel) | 100 x 100 px | 1600 x 1600 px |
| Minimum size (apparel) | 250 x 250 px | 1600 x 1600 px |
| Universal minimum (from Jan 31, 2027) | 500 x 500 px | Well clear of it |
| Maximum size | 64 megapixels | Stay under 16 MP |
| Maximum file size | 16 MB | Under 2 MB |
| Accepted formats | JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, TIFF | JPEG or WebP |
| Product fill | 75–90% of frame | ~85% |
| Additional images | Up to 10 via additional_image_link | 4–8 per SKU |
Two URL rules trip people up more than the pixel specs. First, the image URL must return a 200 and be accessible to Googlebot — if your CDN blocks unknown crawlers or requires a signed token that expires, Google sees a broken image and disapproves the product. Second, changing the URL is how you force a re-crawl. Google caches images aggressively; if you overwrite shirt-blue.jpg in place with a corrected file, Merchant Center may keep serving the old one for weeks. Version the filename instead: shirt-blue-v2.jpg.
Hotlinking supplier or manufacturer images means your feed breaks the moment they reorganize their site. It also puts you in a queue behind every other reseller using the identical file, which does nothing for differentiation in Shopping results.
What Gets Your Products Disapproved
Google's image policy is stricter than most marketplaces because Shopping surfaces are ad inventory. The rule of thumb: the image should show the product and nothing else. These are the violations that generate the bulk of disapprovals.
Promotional overlays are the biggest offender. Any text baked into the pixels — "SALE," "50% OFF," "FREE SHIPPING," a price badge, a starburst, a "NEW" ribbon — violates policy. So do decorative borders and frames. The reasoning is simple: Google renders its own price and promotion badges in the Shopping UI, and a hardcoded discount in your image can go stale and mislead shoppers.
Watermarks and logos are prohibited when they're overlaid on the image. A logo that appears on the product itself — printed on the packaging, embossed on a bag — is fine. A semi-transparent studio watermark across the corner is not.
Placeholder and generic images get flagged even when they look professional: "image coming soon" graphics, a single color swatch standing in for a garment, an illustration of a product category rather than the actual SKU. For most categories Google wants a photograph of the real item, though it permits graphic renderings for hardware, vehicles, and a few software-adjacent verticals.
Framing matters more than sellers expect. A product occupying less than 75% of the frame reads as low quality and can be flagged; filling more than 90% risks cropping edges. Around 85% is the sweet spot — the same target Amazon uses, which makes a shared master file practical.
Merchant Center vs. Other Marketplaces
If you sell across channels, the good news is that Google's rules are compatible with most other marketplaces — the specs are close enough that one high-resolution master can feed everything, with per-channel crops generated downstream.
| Channel | Min size | Background | Text overlays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Merchant Center | 500 x 500 (2027) | White/neutral recommended | Banned on main image |
| Amazon | 1000 x 1000 for zoom | Pure white required | Banned on main image |
| Walmart | 1000 x 1000 | White required | Banned on main image |
| eBay | 500 px longest side | Plain, uncluttered | Banned |
| Meta catalog | 500 x 500 | Flexible | Allowed within limits |
The practical takeaway: shoot or generate at 2000 x 2000 or larger on pure white, keep the product at roughly 85% fill, and every channel above is satisfied by a downscale. The channel-specific work then becomes cropping to different aspect ratios and swapping in lifestyle variants where a channel rewards them — not reshooting.
Google allows lifestyle and in-context images through additional_image_link even when your main image must be a clean packshot. Sellers who populate 4+ additional images consistently see better engagement on Shopping listings than those submitting a single hero shot.
Fixing a Catalog That Is Already Disapproved
Merchant Center offers automatic image improvements, an opt-in setting where Google attempts to strip detected text, watermarks, overlays, and logos from your images and re-approve the product. It is worth enabling as a safety net, but it should not be your strategy: the automated removal can leave smeared patches where the overlay used to be, and you have no control over the result that shoppers see.
A better sequence for a catalog with widespread issues:
- Pull the diagnostics export. Merchant Center's Diagnostics tab gives you a per-SKU list of image issues. Export it before touching anything so you have a baseline count.
- Group by root cause, not by SKU. Nearly always the problems cluster: one seasonal batch has sale badges, one supplier's images are 300 px, one category was shot with the product too small. Three fixes can clear thousands of SKUs.
- Regenerate rather than patch. Cloning out a "20% OFF" starburst by hand in Photoshop is slow and often leaves visible artifacts on textured backgrounds. Rebuilding the image from the original product photo — clean background, product recentered to 85% fill, upscaled to spec — produces a compliant file that also works on Amazon and Walmart.
- Version every filename. New URL, new crawl. Skipping this is the single most common reason a "fixed" catalog stays disapproved.
- Resubmit and wait for recrawl. Re-review typically takes a few days. Don't stack more feed changes on top while it processes, or you won't know what fixed what.
Manual remediation
- Retoucher edits each file individually
- Professional retouching runs $25–50 per image
- Days to weeks for a large catalog
- Overlay removal often leaves visible patching
- Output sized for one channel at a time
AI-assisted remediation
- Batch process the whole disapproved group at once
- A fraction of traditional retouching cost
- Hours instead of weeks
- Background rebuilt cleanly, not cloned over
- One master exports to every channel spec
Tools like Retouchable are built for exactly this shape of problem — taking a batch of non-compliant product photos and producing clean, correctly framed, marketplace-ready images without rebooking studio time.
Building a Feed That Stays Compliant
Getting reinstated is one problem; staying compliant as you add SKUs is another. The catalogs that don't drift share a few habits.
Separate promo assets from catalog assets at the file level. The most common way a badge ends up in a feed is a marketing team producing a "sale version" of a hero image and someone syncing the wrong folder. Keep promotional variants in a directory the feed never reads.
Validate before you submit. A pre-flight check on new images — dimensions above threshold, file under 2 MB, URL returns 200, no text detected in the main image — catches issues before Google does. Automated text detection is cheap to run and catches the badge problem immediately.
Audit quarterly. Image URLs rot. CDNs get reconfigured, suppliers move files, staging domains get decommissioned. Run a crawl of every image_link in your feed once a quarter and look for non-200 responses before Merchant Center flags them.
Plan for the 2027 threshold now. If you have legacy SKUs sitting between 250 and 500 pixels, they will be disapproved in bulk on January 31, 2027. Filtering your feed for images under 500 px today gives you a finite, known list to work through rather than an emergency.