Export product images from Shopify

April 10, 2026
Image Management
13 min read

Shopify product image export is something that most Shopify store owners have never really needed to do until it is left to change. For example, a developer (maybe even you) is tasked with theme migration for your store and ends up accidentally deleting all of your product images. Bad enough, right? But it gets worse when you realize that Shopify doesn’t offer a way to download all of your images from the admin. That is, unless you want to save each image individually. A right click on the image will allow you to save it, but doing that for 100 product images is a real pain. A better approach is needed.

This is so common, it’s shocking. Moving a site to a new platform, backing up a store, helping market people find product images to post to Instagram, preparing images for inclusion in print catalogs, helping a wholesale partner to include high-resolution images of products in their marketing materials. The export of product images is a task that Shopify makes unnecessarily difficult to accomplish.

The complete, step by step guide on how to export Shopify product images. Includes instructions on the manual process (applicable for small shops) as well as a method for pulling product images using a simple URL extraction in a CSV file. We also cover the power user method for doing product image exports using a Shopify app called Matrixify, as well as a dedicated app called CS Export Product Images that enables you to export product images with just a few clicks. We also go over common use cases and pitfalls.

Alongside image exports, consider setting up Rubik Combined Listings to group products and add variant swatches to collection pages.

In this post

Why Shopify has no native image export

The vast majority of Shopify stores store their product images on Shopify’s CDN (content delivery network). This means that when you upload an image to your store, Shopify will automatically process it, create multiple sizes and serve those from cdn.shopify.com (something like this: cdn.shopify.com/c/storename/products/product.jpg). The original uploaded file is not stored in a downloadable format anywhere in your admin.

In order to make life a little easier for our customers, the product CSV export includes an “Image Src” column with the CDN URLs for each product image. However, these are links to the CDN server, and not downloadable files. So instead of downloading a single file with all of the images for a product, you’ll visit the URL such as https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0123/4567/products/blue-shirt-front.jpg and save the file manually. For a 500 product store with 6 images per product, that means 3,000 individual downloads.

Why Shopify doesn’t just add a “Download all images” button? This is a really easy feature to add, but it probably never gets added because most Shopify store owners never need it until they do need it. Serving those files from Shopify’s CDN to customers around the world at bulk can be expensive. It’s another product gap at a company that moves billions of dollars of GMV every year.

Manual download (the slow way)

Manual downloading of products and images is fine for stores with less than 30 products and 10 images etc. but for larger stores this becomes very time consuming and a huge headache!

  1. Open a product in your Shopify admin.
  2. Click on each image to open it in the media viewer.
  3. Right-click the image and select “Save image as.”
  4. Repeat for every image on every product.

These files are the already processed versions of your files on your Shopify store, not the original files you uploaded. While they are high quality and you will see the largest file size when you directly open the image on your Shopify store, I have found that the file size on the CDN for uploaded original files with a maximum width of 5000px are actually much smaller.

Note: Manually downloading products beyond 30 products is not practical or effective. It becomes difficult to maintain accuracy especially if you plan to add descriptive images. For a large line of products, other methods in this guide will be more effective.

CSV export with image URLs

We use Shopify’s semi-automated method of updating products (export products to a .csv file, then import using a bulk download tool).

  1. Export your product CSV. Go to Products > Export > All products > CSV. You get a file with an “Image Src” column containing CDN URLs.
  2. Extract the Image Src column. Open the CSV in Google Sheets or Excel. Copy all the values from the Image Src column into a text file, one URL per line.
  3. Batch download the URLs. Use a browser extension like DownThemAll, a command-line tool like wget, or a desktop app like JDownloader. Feed it the URL list and let it download all files.

Yes, this can be done. However, the filename Shopify downloads will be an internal, hash-like string, NOT the name of the actual file. ALSO, if you don’t map product to images within the code, you will have to reference the downloaded files using the CSV output from shopify. Additionally, files for which the URL has expired or has been moved will fail to download without error.

For technical merchants who are SPREADSHEET/COMMAND LINE POWER USERS, this is free and functional. For everybody else, it’s not worth the headache. Validate your CSV structure here before downloading it: CSV Validator. This list will go bad the first time someone changes the structure of Image Src.

CS Export Product Images app

We created CS Export Product Images because all other solutions were either manual, broken or required programming skills that most merchant, are not experts in. This app does one thing and it does it well: it exports product images as downloadable ZIP files.

What it does:

  • Filter by collection, vendor, or tag. Export images from only your “Summer 2026” collection, or only from vendor “MainSupplier.” No need to export everything if you only need a subset.
  • Rename during export. The app can rename files using product title, SKU, variant name, or a custom pattern. This means you get files like blue-cotton-shirt-front.jpg instead of a3f2b1c4d5e6.jpg. Helpful for SEO-friendly naming if you plan to use the images elsewhere.
  • Preserve folder structure. Each product gets its own folder in the ZIP. Images are organized so you can find them after export without cross-referencing a spreadsheet.
  • CSV metadata export. Alongside the images, the app can generate a CSV mapping each file to its product, variant, alt text, and position. Useful for re-imports to another platform.

Product photography for stores requires more than just taking good pictures. As product photography gets deployed across various channels such as Shopify, Amazon, social media, and print, having a clean export with proper naming is paramount. Hash strings or confusing file names in your exports can quickly turn into a mess if not dealt with early on.

Matrixify for advanced exports

Matrixify (formerly Excelify) is another app that allows you to import and export Shopify product data as well as upload and download images. While it is not optimized for image exports like our Export Product Images app, it does allow you to export product data with image URLs and export in excel format. It also has more control over fields than Export Product Images.

Matrixify from Shopify seems to handle complex data operations well. I exported products with their metafields, custom fields, and even variant information per line, along with the image metadata. For those who need more than just the images (like uploading catalogs), Matrixify is definitely worth checking out.

This product allows you to “matrixify” the image urls of exports, so that if you need to download images later, you can do so with a second step (and a second call to the store’s api). A trade-off for slightly steeper learning curves to use this product as opposed to the dedicated image export product for 100% image exports. However there are many use cases where you need to also export full data of a store, with images included in that data. This is a product for those cases.

Common use cases for image export

Every merchant who gets into image exporting has a reason that drives them. I’m listing out the top 5 reasons, and how to be the best at each.

Migrating from Shopify to another platform or moving from one Shopify store to another. Exporting all images for the appropriate products with corresponding metadata. You can use the Export Product Images app and enable the CSV metadata option to export and import images and the associated metadata on the new platform. Also see our guide on WooCommerce migration to compare directions should you be headed in the opposite direction.

Backup – Shopify does not offer automatic image backups. Images of deleted products will be lost forever. I recommend doing a monthly export of your store and saving the ZIP file in Google Drive or Dropbox for “cheap insurance”. Many shop owners learn this lesson the hard way and then have their computer automate the quarterly export of their backups.

Marketing and social media. Someone on your marketing team probably used a screenshot to make a Facebook post about your store. Now they want 200 or so product images for Instagram posts, Facebook ads, email banners, and print ads , and they don’t want to have to right-click on each individual product image in your storefront to save them to their computer. They only want to download the “New Arrivals” collection, renamed with the product names, and then using our Social Media Image Resizer they can resize the images to the appropriate dimensions for each social media platform. We can create a filtered export that exactly meets their needs and deliver it all in one ZIP file.

Wholesale partner requests. B2B buyers and wholesale partners can be looking for a product catalog with images. A smart export from Shopify with folded organized by product and with SEO optimized file names is by far the most professional solution – way more than sending them a Dropbox link to an unorganized folder.

Relocating images for a variant image enabled store. This involved downloading images, renaming the images with the correct variant name, and then re-uploading them to store with new file names and correct assignments. This process involves first exporting all the images, renaming them based on the desired variant naming convention, and then re-uploading all images using the bulk upload feature.

Prep work before exporting

A few minutes of prep prevents hours of cleanup after export.

Using Alt Text? First Audit The Images You’re Going To Use. Before you upload images to Shopify, check the alt text that you have assigned to similar images already on the site. Run an Image Audit to fill in missing alt text, then export images for the new site. The exported images will include the alt text in their metadata. Then, when you upload those images on the new platform, you can do a copy/paste of the exported images into the new platform, instead of re-uploading and re-writing the alt text.

Decide on naming convention Decide how you want to name the files while you are exporting out the images. This will depend on where the images are going and how they will be used. This app allows you to have flexibility on how you name files but you should decide on a naming convention ahead of time based on where the images are going. If you are putting the images on another platform for SEO purposes, product-title is best. If images are going to a warehouse or supplier, SKU is best. You can choose another naming convention for other purposes.

Keep it relevant. There’s no need to export every photo when only a subset will do. By being selective you’ll reduce storage requirements and unnecessary files to sift through later. Use collection or tag filters to limit the number of images to be prepared for upload.

Keep a copy of the original export ZIP archived off somewhere safely. Never modify the exported files, you can have a copy of the export in a working folder and modify the copies in there but always have the original ZIP to go back to as a reference.

FAQ

Can I download all my Shopify product images at once?

Not natively. Shopify’s CSV export includes the URL for the image file rather than the file itself. CS Export Product Images can export all of your images as a ZIP file organized by collection, vendor or tag.

Are exported images the same quality as my originals?

When you upload product images on Shopify, they get processed in some form, and Shopify will also resize and compress the image for optimal display on the site. The exported images are these processed versions that Shopify uses, and are of very high quality, but may not match exactly the original file. It’s a good idea to keep a copy of the source files on your local computer for reference.

Can I export images for just one collection?

Yes. The CS Export Product Images app has features to filter by collection, vendor, and tag. You select the collection (vendor/tag/tag) and only the images of the products in that collection will be exported.

How long does a bulk image export take?

It depends on the actual number and size of images. A 500 product store with 3000 images for example will take a few minutes to generate the ZIP file for download, however for a larger catalogue this time will be longer. The app will process in the background, allowing you to return to your browser at any time.

Can I rename images during export?

This CS Export Product Images app lets you rename exported images based on product title, SKU, variant names and/or any custom string of your choice. Renaming images with your product information in their file names also helps with SEO.

Does Shopify automatically back up my product images?

No. Shopify stores your images on their CDN but does not do automatic backup/versions. This means if you delete a product, its images will be lost forever. You should make sure you are doing regular exports to keep a backup of your images.

Your product images are one of the assets of your store that you paid for. Don’t let them be stuck on a platform with no download option. Download CS Export Product Images and start your first product image backup export today!

Co-Founder at Craftshift

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