How to export product images from Shopify by vendor or collection

April 10, 2026
Image Management
10 min read

We’ve had a number of requests lately for an option to export product images for a Shopify store by vendor or collection. It seemed like a straight-forward feature to implement, and we built it. In late October a merchant contacted us with a rather urgent need to download all images for wholesale partners. In her Shopify store she had every product from her Summer 2025 collection uploaded. There were 340 products in the collection, which was about 2,000 images total. Currently, the tools available to a merchant within the Shopify admin would be to right-click on each image individually to download one by one, or download all the products in a collection as a CSV and write a script to download images from the product image URLs. But there is no option to download all images for a collection, and you would get the images packaged up in a ZIP.

This post explains why Shopify can’t export images filtered by vendor or collection, gives some work arounds for the problem, outlines my new CS Export Product Images 1 click filtered image export, and provides step by step instructions to show you exactly how to use it in about 5 minutes.

If you have ever tried to hand off product photos to a marketplace partner, a photographer, to a wholesale distributor and realized you had no way to pull just the right slice of your catalog. This is not a common problem.

In this post

Why you need filtered image exports

Most retailers won’t need to download every product image all at once. Instead they will require a slice of the catalog for a particular purpose such as showcasing the products of one particular supplier as part of a co-marketing initiative, gathering together a selection of products that are seasonal and can be used in a lookbook, or gathering together all products that have been tagged with “wholesale” for a distributor designated portal area. The full catalog export is not always the best answer for these types of requirements.

I have 1,200 items, 8 vendors and this is how I want it: My vendor “Moonstone Ceramics” has 90 items with images. After I get the 90 images I need, I want each image to be organized by product handle (and not by download order), named with the product title, and packaged up in a zipped file. This is not how I would want to create a workflow for downloading 90 items – this is how I would want to punish someone for insisting on downloading 1200 items and 8 vendors for a workflow.

Filtered exports save hours and significantly reduce error. Handing your partner just the relevant images for their export, rather than a full batch of images for all of your products, makes for a much smoother export process. Check first how many images you actually have and whether you have missing images for products you should fix before setting up exports.

What Shopify gives you natively (not much)

That Shopify didn’t build their export tools specifically for image export. Here is what you get.

  1. Product CSV export. You can filter by product type or status before exporting, but the CSV contains image URLs, not files. No collection filter. No vendor filter on the export itself (you filter the product list first, then export). And you still end up with CDN URLs that need a separate download step.
  2. Files section. The admin Files page shows uploaded assets. No bulk download. No ZIP. No filter by product or collection. One file at a time.
  3. Shopify API. The Products API supports filtering by collection_id, vendor, and product_type. You can write code to fetch image URLs per product and download them. This works, but you are building a tool from scratch every time.

None of these give you “select a collection, click export, get a ZIP”. That gap in functionality is why we make export apps. Why Shopify doesn’t offer this functionality I have no idea. Exporting images by collection is such a simple feature to implement I’m surprised it doesn’t exist.

The CSV workaround and its limits

The most common DIY approach goes like this:

  1. Filter your product list in the admin by collection or vendor.
  2. Export those filtered products as CSV.
  3. Extract the Image Src column.
  4. Feed the URLs into a download script (wget, curl, Python).
  5. Organize the downloaded files into folders manually.

This works kinda. But by the time you need to put folders in for the product handles, name the images with something other then the Shopify CDN hash, put the meta data next to the files, this is really a script to run once per product. It took me about 30 minutes to set up for our 20 products. Recurring would be a huge time suck and our catalog is growing.

Shopify doesn’t keep alt text for the downloads, and also doesn’t include the alt text in the CSV file for the download links. So you have to manually cross reference the link with the csv row by position which is painstaking enough.

CS Export Product Images: filtered exports that work

CS Export Product Images does exactly what it says, which is to connect to your Shopify admin and export all the images for your products. It first filters the products by collection, vendor or tag before it processes them. It then exports all the images for each product into individual folders with sensible file names, and creates a CSV file listing all the product information, including handle, title, alt text and position, as well as the variant SKU for the product’s base variant. The images and metadata are zip archived and stored on your computer for easy uploading to another program for further processing and manipulation.

Key features that matter for filtered exports:

  • Collection filter. Pick one or more collections. Only products in those collections are included.
  • Vendor filter. Pick a vendor. Only that vendor’s products are exported.
  • Tag filter. Filter by product tag for custom workflows (e.g., “wholesale”, “seasonal-2025”).
  • Folder structure. Each product gets its own sub-folder named by handle.
  • Rename during export. Use product title, handle, or SKU as the filename base instead of Shopify’s CDN hash.
  • CSV metadata. A companion CSV ships with the ZIP so you can re-import or hand off with full context.

Export comes out of beta and now runs as a background job so you don’t have to sit there and stare at the screen while it runs – especially on large catalogs with 500+ products. On the other hand, very small catalogs will probably complete in a few seconds and you’ll get to download the generated ZIP right away instead. Larger exports will complete and you’ll get a download link as soon as the ZIP is ready.

Step-by-step: export by vendor or collection

Here is the actual workflow, 5 steps in 3 minutes of furious clicking.

  1. Open CS Export Product Images from your Shopify admin apps list.
  2. Select your filter. Choose “By Collection” or “By Vendor” from the filter dropdown. Pick the specific collection or vendor you want.
  3. Configure output. Choose whether you want folder structure by handle, filename renaming, and CSV metadata. For most cases, leave all three on.
  4. Click Export. The app starts pulling images from the Shopify API, organizing them, and building the ZIP.
  5. Download the ZIP. For small catalogs the download starts immediately. For larger ones, you get a notification when it is ready.

No scripting, no making folders manually, or cross-referencing of a CSV file required, all you need to do is hand the ZIP file off to whoever needs it.

If you need to rename the files exported for further processing (say for use on Amazon you may need to rename them) you can use something like the bulk image renamer on the downloaded images. Also if you find the images are too big for web use, you can compress them in bulk without losing quality with the image compressor.

Real use cases for filtered exports

Why filter by vendor or collection instead of just exporting everything? Well, “everything” is usually incorrect for some reason. Here are the reasons why that is:

  • Wholesale handoff. Your wholesale partner carries three of your twelve vendors. Export just those three vendors’ images, renamed with the partner’s SKU convention, delivered as one ZIP per vendor.
  • Seasonal collection archive. The summer collection is over. Pull the images before removing the collection, so you have them for next year’s catalog reuse.
  • Marketplace cross-listing. Listing 200 products on Amazon? Export that collection, rename for Amazon’s requirements, and upload. See our product image SEO guide for naming conventions that work across platforms.
  • Photographer review. Send the photographer only the “Outerwear” collection images so they can match angles and lighting for the reshoot. No need to ship 5,000 images when they need 300.
  • Vendor audit. A vendor updated their product photos and you want to compare old vs new. Export the vendor’s current images, receive the new batch, diff them locally.

Each of these steps could take 10 minutes using a filtered export app, or hours without one. The numbers are against you if you have less than 30 products. See our full export product images guide to learn more about the limits of Shopify’s export functionality.

-screenshot- If you are dealing with images across products as well as images across variants, the approach needed for a workflow to handle images can be very different. See our complete guide to shopify variant images, and how apps like Rubik Variant Images add product page filtering abilities.

FAQ

Can I export Shopify product images filtered by collection?

Not using the native Shopify tools The product CSV export doesn’t filter images by collection, but the CS Export Product Images app can filter by collection, vendor or tag, and export all images with one-click as a zip file.

Can I export images from just one vendor?

Yes, with CS Export Product Images. Select the vendor filter and then the vendor you wish to export product images for and the export will only include those images.

Does the filtered export preserve folder structure?

Yes. The ZIP File will include all images in a sub folder that corresponds to the handle or SKU of the product and all exports will be organized the same. Full Catalog Export and Filtered Catalog Exports will both have the same organizational structure.

Can I rename images during a filtered export?

Yes. The rename function will still work with any filter in place, and you can use the product handle, title or sku as the filename base for the renamed files.

How long does a filtered export take?

Exporting a small collection of products (less than 100 products) takes seconds. Larger collections are exported as background jobs and therefore don’t freeze up your store. A 500 product collection with 6 images per product might take a few minutes to export.

Does the export include variant-specific images?

Yes, all images for a product are included in the upload as well as a companion file that lists which image goes with which variant based on SKU.

Next. Install CS Export Product Images. Choose 1 collection, and do a test export. You’ll have a nice ZIP file in less than a minute, and you’ll wonder why you wasted so much time right clicking.

Co-Founder at Craftshift

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