Google Shopping image requirements: auditing supplier images for the 500 by 500 pixel rule

What is changing, and when

Google Shopping image requirements change on 31 January 2027. From that date, every picture sent to Google Merchant Center through the image link and additional image link attributes must be at least 500 by 500 pixels, across all product categories and every way Google shows products.¹

Until then the floors are much lower: 100 by 100 pixels for most products and 250 by 250 for clothing. The one place 500 by 500 already applies is YouTube Shopping ads, whose images need it to be shown on a television.²

Google began warning merchants on 14 April 2026. A product whose image misses the new minimum carries a warning called “Image too small for upcoming enforcement” in the Needs attention section of Merchant Center, so the size of the job is already visible in your own account.¹

What Google will fix for you, and what it will not

Google will rescue some small images itself, but only some of them, and only as far as the letter of the rule. Alongside the new minimum it has said it will begin optimising some images smaller than 500 by 500, and that the optimised images “will meet the new image requirements and will prevent product disapproval without any action from you”. Those images are marked with a warning in Needs attention, so you can see which they are.¹

That is a safety net, and a welcome one. It is not a fix. Whatever the optimisation does, it starts from the pixels you sent, and a 160 pixel thumbnail holds no more detail however large it is drawn. Google’s own best practice for the attribute says so in one line: “Don’t scale up an image or submit a thumbnail.”³

Nor is 500 the number to aim for. On the same page Google recommends “images of around 1500 x 1500 pixels or above to ensure best performance in all listing formats”.³ Five hundred is the floor below which a listing is at risk. Fifteen hundred is where a shopper can zoom in and see what they are buying.

Size is also the only thing the optimisation is described as addressing. A picture can clear 500 pixels and still break the rules on content, and no amount of resizing takes a logo or a watermark out of it.

Why supplier images fail

Supplier images fail on size first, but rarely on size alone. Whether a supplier sends image links in its spreadsheet or you collect them from its product pages, the same five problems come back.

• Thumbnails. What a product page shows first is the gallery picture, sized for the page rather than for a zoom.
• Duplicates. The same shot twice, at two sizes or under two names.
• Logos and badges. The supplier’s own logo or a payment badge, collected as if it were a product photograph. Google does not allow a logo or icon in place of the product, and it rules out watermarks, overlays, borders and placeholder images as well.³
• Dead links. A link that worked when the sheet was made and does not now, or a server that turns automated requests away.
• Formats. Files a destination will not take. Google accepts JPEG, WebP, PNG, GIF, BMP and TIFF.³ Shopify also takes PSD, SVG and HEIC.⁴ So an image your store accepts can still need converting before it goes into a Google feed, and a format on neither list, such as AVIF, needs converting before it goes anywhere.

Dead links are the easiest of the five to miss, because a spreadsheet cannot show that a link has died. On one of our recent jobs, for a musical instrument retailer, we fetched all 12,015 image links on the catalogue before the file was built, and 3,566 came back broken or blocked. Nearly a third of them. The import never saw one.

The limits side by side

If you sell through your own store and through Google, each image has to satisfy both sets of limits, and they are not the same. Here they are together, as each platform publishes them.

The row worth a second look is the largest allowed. A manufacturer’s full-size original can be bigger than a store will take: Shopify’s ceiling is 5000 by 5000 pixels or 25 megapixels, well under Google’s 64.⁴ The original is still the right starting point, but it may need resizing on the way in.

Shopify also asks for a consistent shape. Its help page notes that images only display at the same size if they share a height-to-width ratio, which is worth settling before a thousand files are converted rather than after.⁴

How to audit a supplier’s images, step by step

An image audit is eight steps, and it belongs on every supplier file rather than on the calendar once a year. Each step needs the one before it, which is why the order matters.

1. List every image link. Main and additional images, each tied to the product it belongs to, so any problem can be traced back to a SKU.
2. Fetch each one and record what comes back. An image, an error, a refusal, or a web page where an image should be. A link that does not return an image is a missing image, whatever the spreadsheet says.
3. Measure the pixels, not the file name. Read the width and height from the file itself. A name like “large” or “1500” says nothing about what is inside it.
4. Sort by size. Flag anything under 500 pixels on either side, which Google will act on from 31 January 2027, and separately anything under 1500, Google’s recommended size.
5. Look for the original behind each small image. On a manufacturer’s or supplier’s product page, the gallery picture is often a scaled-down copy of a larger file, reachable from the zoom view or from the image address itself. Replace the thumbnail with that file, not with a stretched copy of the thumbnail.
6. Remove what should not be there. Logos and badges, placeholders, watermarked or bordered pictures, and second copies of the same shot.
7. Fit each file to where it is going. Convert formats the store or the feed will not take, and resize anything over the largest size they allow.
8. Check again just before the file is built. Links break between collection and import, so the last fetch should be as close to the import as you can make it.

Why the check belongs before the file is built

Images are cheapest to fix while the catalogue is still a spreadsheet. By the time a feed is rejected, the thumbnail has already been imported into your store and sent to every channel you sell through. Fixing it then means finding the original anyway, and pushing the change through every system it reached.

That is why image checks are one step of supplier data onboarding rather than a project of their own: the supplier file is where the links arrive, so it is where they should be tested. Pictures are also one part of what product data enrichment covers, alongside a product’s identity, its specifications and its place in your categories.

It is how RefynData’s product data enrichment service handles them. Every image in the file is measured, the full-size original behind each thumbnail is found, logos, badges and duplicates are dropped, formats a store will not import are converted, and the images that survive are put on links that keep working.

A picture is also one line of a wider check. A usable image for every product sits in the product data quality checklist beside the specifications and sources that decide whether a catalogue is ready to go live.

What to do before 31 January 2027

Start with the warnings you already have, then fix the images at their source rather than only in the feed.

• Read your own warnings. Look in Needs attention for “Image too small for upcoming enforcement”. It tells you how many products are affected today.
• Treat Google’s optimisation as a safety net. It may keep a small image from being disapproved. A logo, a watermark or a dead link is still yours to fix.
• Replace thumbnails with originals, best sellers first. A listing that clears 500 pixels meets the rule. One at 1500 is worth zooming into.
• Fix the supplier file as well as the feed. Google’s own route for small images is to filter Needs attention, download the affected products as a CSV, update the image links in your data and upload it again.² That repairs the feed. Correcting the supplier file stops the next delivery bringing the same images back.

Five hundred pixels is the floor Google will enforce. The target was always the full-size picture.