Ecommerce Photo Editing!!! Should You Outsource or Do Them In House?

Since you are reading this article, you must be a bit hesitant about the Editing part of your ecommerce photography. But don’t worry, you are not alone. Many product photographers face the same issue at some point of their journey.

In today's fast moving world e commerce has become quite a necessity. Therefore the demand for visual content needed for ecommerce is too high. To keep up with the fast pace photographers and photo studios need to speed up their shooting and editing.

It’s literally a race against time since the volume is competitively very high.

In-house photo editing, where the photographer or Photo Studio has to take care of the photo editing.

The reason why photographers and Studios choose to edit photos in-house is they get full control over the look and feel of the images. Also it is easy to make sure the quality of the photo and one can get a real-time update. Sometimes it’s not even easy to make a 3rd party vendor understand the requirements over email or phone communication.

For brand specific retouching / creative retouching it is always best to keep the photo editing team in-house.

However, keep in mind that an in-house photo editing team is quite a luxury if you compare the cost with a 3rd party vendor.

On the other hand, outsourcing photo editing is where a Photographer or Photo Studio chooses a different company to take care of their photo editing.

When you are outsourcing photo editing, you are giving off the photo editing part to a vendor who is skilled in it. Choose someone who has more experience and has done similar jobs over and over again before. Test them a couple times if needed.

Since you are relying on a company instead of a small in-house team, you can often expect a quick turnaround. Also a lot of time for yourself or maybe start shooting another batch of ecommerce products. At the same time you will be able to reduce the editing costs which can add up as some extra margin for your photography business.

But again, keep in mind that selecting a bad vendor can become a nightmare very quickly since not all of them are as skilled or capable as they mention. It also takes away some control from your hand. You can only see the images once done.

In conclusion, both methods are very effective depending on the need you have. Both In House photo editing and Outsource photo editing is quite common for most photographers and photo studios. So the choice solely depends on personal preference.