Shopify’s Translate & Adapt app handles text across multiple languages, but your product images – size charts, ingredient lists, feature callouts – remain untouched. The app simply can’t swap images based on language. For merchants with image-based information, a dedicated solution like Product Image Translate Easy fills this gap.
TLDR: Ready to complete your localization stack? Install Product Image Translate Easy and bridge the gap between your translated text and your visual content.
Shopify’s Translate & Adapt app is powerful. It handles product descriptions, collection pages, theme content, and checkout flows across multiple languages. For merchants expanding internationally, it’s often the first tool they install.
But there’s a significant limitation that the app’s description doesn’t make obvious: it only works with text content. Your product images – including the ones packed with crucial information like size charts, ingredient lists, and feature callouts – remain untouched regardless of what language your customer selects.
This isn’t a bug or an oversight. It’s simply outside the scope of what text translation tools do. Understanding this distinction helps you build a complete localization strategy rather than discovering gaps after launch.
Translate & Adapt scans your store for translatable text content. This includes product titles and descriptions, collection titles and descriptions, blog posts and pages, theme strings and navigation, checkout and notification content, and metafields with text content.
For each piece of text, you can provide a translation manually, import translations from a file, or use automatic translation as a starting point. The app then serves the appropriate text version based on the customer’s language selection or market.
This is genuinely useful functionality. Without it, international selling on Shopify would require either duplicate stores or complex workarounds. Translate & Adapt provides a clean, manageable system for text localization.
The limitation appears when you consider what isn’t text. Product images, even those containing text, are treated as media files. When you upload a photo to Shopify, it becomes a single asset attached to that product. Translate & Adapt has no mechanism to swap this asset based on language.
This means your size chart image showing inches and US sizes appears to everyone. Your supplement label with English ingredient lists displays to your German customers. Your infographic explaining product benefits in English shows up on your Spanish storefront.
The app simply can’t see inside images to translate them, and it can’t swap one image for another based on context.
Five years ago, this limitation mattered less. Product images were mostly straightforward photos – different angles, lifestyle shots, maybe a white background studio image. Text lived in the description.
Modern e-commerce has changed this. Product images now carry substantial informational weight. Brands create elaborate infographics explaining features. Size charts are presented as designed images for better visual clarity. Packaging shots show labels with text. Certification badges and compliance marks appear as overlays.
Some product categories have been particularly aggressive in using image-based information. Supplements and vitamins feature detailed labels and nutritional panels. Apparel includes size charts and material specifications. Electronics show spec sheets and port diagrams. Cosmetics display ingredient lists and usage instructions. Food products feature allergen warnings and nutritional information.
For these categories, an untranslated image isn’t a minor issue – it’s a fundamental barrier to purchase confidence.
When merchants plan international expansion, they typically focus on translation, currency, and shipping. These are the obvious requirements. Translation apps handle the text. Shopify Markets handles currency and domains. Fulfillment partners handle shipping.
Image localization falls into a gap between these categories. It’s not text translation, so translation apps don’t handle it. It’s not a Markets feature because it’s content rather than configuration. It’s not a fulfillment issue.
As a result, many merchants don’t realize it’s a problem until they’re already live in new markets and hearing from confused customers or seeing unexpectedly low conversion rates.
Closing this gap requires a dedicated solution that understands the relationship between language selection and image display. This is the specific problem that Product Image Translate Easy addresses.
The app works alongside your existing translation setup. It monitors the language your customer has selected – whether through Shopify Markets, a language selector, or geolocation – and uses this to determine which product images to display.
You provide the localized image variants. The app handles the logic of showing the right version to the right customer.
The key difference from workarounds like duplicate products or theme code hacks is maintainability. Your product catalog stays clean. Your inventory stays unified. When you want to update an image, you update it once in the app rather than across multiple product duplicates or code files.
Think of your localization stack as having two layers. The text layer, handled by Translate & Adapt or similar apps, manages everything written. The visual layer, handled by Product Image Translate Easy, manages everything shown.
Both layers respond to the same input: the customer’s language selection. But they operate on different content types and require different tools.
When these layers work together, the result is a seamless experience. A customer in France selects French, and everything updates. The product title and description appear in French. The price shows euros. The product images show French text, French sizing, French compliance marks.
When only the text layer is active, the experience is fractured. Perfect French text sits next to English images. The mismatch signals either carelessness or that the customer isn’t really the intended audience.
Adding image localization to an existing translated store is straightforward. The process starts with auditing your catalog for images containing text. Not every product needs localized images – only those where the image contains translatable content.
For products that need localized images, you create the translated variants. If your original images were designed with text on separate layers, this is often a simple export process. If text is baked into photos, you may need design support.
Once your variants exist, you upload them to Product Image Translate Easy and map them to languages. The app handles detection and delivery from there.
The entire process can be completed in an afternoon for a small catalog, or systematically over a week or two for larger stores focusing on high-priority products first.
Translate & Adapt is the right tool for text translation. It’s well-designed and Shopify-native. But acknowledging its scope means understanding what else your international strategy needs.
For most merchants selling products with image-based information, that means adding a dedicated image localization tool. The combination of translated text and localized images creates the complete experience that international customers expect.
Ready to complete your localization stack? Install Product Image Translate Easy and bridge the gap between your translated text and your visual content.