Compress Images for Amazon Listings — Free, Fast & Private
Amazon’s image requirements mix technical limits with content rules, and a listing can be suppressed for either. The technical side:
- 1600 px or larger on the longest side to get the zoom experience on the detail page.
- 10,000 px maximum on the longest side.
- JPEG (
.jpg/.jpeg), TIFF, PNG or GIF — JPEG preferred. Colour space sRGB. - Keep files under about 10 MB to avoid upload problems.
And the content rules that catch more sellers than any file size ever has: the main image needs a pure white background (RGB 255, 255, 255), and the product must fill at least 85% of the frame.
“Pure white” is a number, not a description
RGB 255, 255, 255 means exactly white. A sheet of white paper photographed in daylight is not: it comes out at 248, 250, 245 or similar, and a light grey studio sweep is nowhere near. Amazon checks this, and the failure is silent — the image is simply flagged or the listing quietly under-performs.
The reliable route is to remove the background and place the product on true white, rather than trying to light a background into compliance. Then compress. Doing it in that order matters: background removal works from the cleanest available pixels, so compress last, not first.
The 85% rule interacts with compression
Filling 85% of the frame means cropping close. Crop close from a source image that was already scaled down and you can drop under the 1600 px zoom threshold without noticing — the crop is doing the same thing to your pixel count that a resize does.
Which is why the preset above is 2000 px rather than 1600: it leaves headroom, so an 85% crop still comes out above the zoom threshold. Check the final number after cropping, not before.
Why compress at all, given a 10 MB allowance
Two reasons, neither about the limit. First, catalogue volume: a seller uploading seven images across a hundred ASINs is moving seven hundred files, and the difference between 8 MB and 400 KB each is hours of upload and a lot of failed, retried transfers.
Second, the buyer experience Amazon actually serves is a scaled-down version of your image. Your 8 MB original is not what shoppers see; it is what Amazon processes. A well-compressed 2000 px JPEG produces an identical detail page and an identical zoom, from a file a twentieth of the size.
MiniPx runs entirely in your browser, so unreleased product photography does not pass through anyone else’s servers on its way to Seller Central.
Related: the equivalent eBay thresholds · batching a large shoot