How to photograph a new collection in a day

Set up once and leave everything where it is: the same spot on the floor, the same light, the same height for the phone. Work along the rail in order and repeat the same moves for each piece: steam, lay, front, back if needed, detail, next. Our phone photography guide covers the setup itself. Photograph clothes with a phone

Move the photos to your computer before lunch and check them at full size while the samples are still out. A blurred or cropped photo found now takes a moment to retake; found at the end of the day, it means setting everything up again.

Keep a simple tick list, on paper or on your phone, with one line per product and one column per photo. Tick each photo as you take it, and nothing gets missed when the rail is long.

Put the whole collection in one shoot if it has 20 products or fewer; split a larger one into two shoots with identical settings. Take the model and scene from your house look, and use 4:5 for product pages unless your theme crops to squares, in which case use 1:1. Keep the browser tab open while the images are made.

Make packshots for the same products if your collection pages or marketplaces use them. They come on white, ivory or light grey, floating or laid flat, and square unless you choose otherwise. Leave the clips until the afternoon, and make them from images you have already accepted.

Review with the samples beside you; that is the advantage of doing everything in one day. Hold each piece up to the screen by the window and compare colour, print, button count, neckline and hem. Mark every image accepted, edit or redo, keep moving, and come back to the hard ones at the end.

Small fixes, such as the background, the light or a crop, are edits at 1 credit each. If the garment itself has come out wrong, make that product's images again rather than rerunning the whole shoot. Then look at the full set on a phone, at the size shoppers will see it.

If the collection is also going into a lookbook, our lookbook guide covers how to keep a whole collection looking consistent. Consistent lookbook and collection images

Download the accepted images on a paid plan, as full-resolution files or a ZIP, and rename them by product, colour and view. Upload them to each product in your store, main image first, then add alt text and the measurements and publish.

Last, open every new page on your phone. Check the main image in the collection grid, the order of the gallery and that each colour shows its own photos. Fix what you find tonight, because the launch announcement will send people straight to these pages.

Publish what is finished and hold back what isn't. A collection that goes live with most products complete and a few to follow serves shoppers better than every page half done. Finish the stragglers the next morning, before the announcement goes out.

If the shoot itself is the bottleneck, split it: run the pieces you will lead with first, review them, then run the rest. The lead pieces are the ones the announcement points to, so they deserve the most careful review.