Guide
Shopify Translate & Adapt Won't Translate Your Product Images — Here's How to Finish the Job
You installed Shopify's free Translate & Adapt app, translated your theme and product descriptions, and your German storefront reads beautifully in German — until the visitor scrolls to your product images, where the feature callouts, size chart, and promo banner are still in English (or Chinese). This isn't a bug, and it isn't something you missed in the settings. It's a structural boundary of what any text translation app can do — and it has a clean fix that doesn't involve redoing your designs.
What Translate & Adapt actually covers — which is a lot
Let's be fair first, because Translate & Adapt deserves it. It's Shopify's own app, it's free, and it does the text side of localization properly: translations are stored server-side against your store's languages and served on localized URLs, not patched in with client-side JavaScript. For a merchant expanding into a second or third market, it's the obvious starting point — and for most of your store's content, it's also the finish line.
Theme and store content
Menus, headings, buttons, policy pages, checkout strings — the text your theme renders is translatable, either automatically or by hand, and served on the correct localized URL for each market.
Product titles, descriptions, and metafields
The core catalog content. You can auto-translate a description, then edit the result side by side with the source — a genuinely good review workflow for text.
Notifications and transactional email
Order confirmations and other customer-facing notifications can be localized, so the post-purchase experience matches the language the customer shopped in.
Image alt text
This one surprises people: the alt text attached to an image is a translatable text field. The words describing the image can be German. The words inside the image cannot.
The one thing it structurally cannot touch: pixels
Item 4 above is where the boundary shows itself. Shopify's translation system — Translate & Adapt included — operates on translatable text fields. An image's alt text is such a field. The image itself is a JPEG or PNG: to Shopify, the "50% OFF" badge and the three feature callouts on your hero image are just pixels, indistinguishable from the product photo behind them. There is no field to translate, so there is nothing for a translation app to do.
This is worth being precise about, because merchants often assume they've misconfigured something. You haven't. This is one of the best-known Translate & Adapt limitations, and it applies equally to every text-translation app on the App Store, paid or free: an app that translates text cannot translate text that Shopify doesn't know is text. The words are flattened into the image file long before Shopify ever sees them.
Why a half-translated product page quietly costs you sales
If your product images were plain photos, none of this would matter. But conversion-focused e-commerce images rarely are: they carry the headline, the three feature callouts with arrows, the price badge, the size chart, the "free shipping" strip. That's often where the actual selling happens — the description restates what the images already pitched.
Now picture the page from your German visitor's side. The navigation is German. The product title and description are German — Translate & Adapt did its job. And directly between them sits a banner shouting in Chinese, with feature callouts they can't read. Two things happen: the information in those images simply doesn't reach them, and — arguably worse — the mismatch reads as a store that was machine-localized without care. Trust is the currency of a first-time cross-border purchase, and a half-translated page spends it fast. You paid for the traffic and the design; the message dies in the last meter.
The manual workarounds — and what they really cost
Merchants have been closing this gap by hand for years. Each route works; each has a bill attached.
Have a designer redo each image per language
The traditional route: reopen the PSD or Figma file, swap the copy, re-export, upload. It produces exactly the result you want — and it scales exactly as badly as it sounds. Ten images with text, in four store languages, is forty export-and-upload cycles, repeated every time a design changes. If you no longer have the source files (common with supplier-provided or agency-made images), it means rebuilding the design from a flat JPEG first.
Duplicate products per market
Some merchants create a second product with the German images and publish it only to the German market. It works on day one and decays from there: inventory now lives in two places and can oversell or strand stock, reviews and sales history split across duplicates, and you're maintaining near-identical content that can drift out of sync. It solves an image problem by creating a catalog problem.
Strip the text out of your images entirely
The purist answer — keep images purely visual and put every word in translatable HTML. It's a legitimate design philosophy, but it gives up exactly what annotated images are good at: feature callouts pointing at the actual feature, size charts, before/after labels, badges. Most conversion-focused product imagery has text in it for a reason.
How KeepFormat closes the gap
KeepFormat approaches the problem from the image side instead of the text side. It reads the text inside the image, translates it with AI, and rebuilds it in place — aiming to preserve the layout, fonts, colors, and background so the translated image still looks like your image, not like a patched-over copy. If you've wondered how to translate product images for Shopify without reopening a single design file, this is the mechanism. (For what "preserving the design" should mean in detail — clean text erasure, matched font weight and outline, sensible handling of longer translations — we wrote a separate checklist guide you can hold any tool to, including ours.)
Three design decisions matter for a Shopify store specifically:
- Originals are never modified. Translated versions live alongside your source images, so there is no destructive step and no lock-in — remove the app and your store is exactly as it was.
- Per-language delivery is automatic.A one-time theme app embed detects the visitor's storefront language and swaps in the matching translated image. Your German market sees German images; everyone else sees exactly what they saw before. No duplicated products, no theme surgery.
- It's a complement, not a replacement.This point deserves to be explicit: KeepFormat does not translate your theme, descriptions, or notifications, and doesn't try to. Keep Translate & Adapt for the text layer — it's good at it and it's free. KeepFormat covers the one layer it can't reach. A fully localized store runs both.
Setup: from install to localized images
- Install KeepFormat from the Shopify App Store.
- Pick the images that actually contain text — banners, infographics, size charts, annotated photos. Skip the plain product shots; they need nothing.
- Translate them into the languages your store already sells in.
- Review each result side by side with the original.
- Approve the ones that pass — nothing publishes without your sign-off.
- Publish the approved versions.
- Enable the app embed in your theme editor once. From then on, matching-language visitors get the translated images automatically.
Where this doesn't help — read before you install
- Photos without text gain nothing.If your catalog is clean product photography with all copy in HTML, you don't have this problem and you don't need this tool.
- AI output should be reviewed before publishing. Translation quality inside images is good but not infallible — the review step exists precisely so a human approves every image before a customer sees it. Budget a few minutes for it rather than treating it as a formality.
- Pricing, plainly: the free tier includes 10 images — enough to test on your own real banners before paying anything. Pro is $9.90/month for 100 images per cycle, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Frequently asked questions
Does Shopify Translate & Adapt translate images?
No — and it doesn't claim to. Translate & Adapt localizes text content: theme strings, product titles and descriptions, metafields, notifications, and image alt text. The pixels inside an image file are not text content, so any words baked into your product or marketing images stay in the original language on every market.
Is KeepFormat a replacement for Translate & Adapt?
No. They do different jobs and work best together. Translate & Adapt handles your store's text — keep using it for that. KeepFormat handles the one thing it structurally can't reach: text inside image files. A fully localized store typically runs both.
Will my original images be changed or overwritten?
No. KeepFormat never modifies your original files. Translated versions are stored separately, and the app embed swaps in the right language variant at display time for matching-language visitors. Disable the embed and your store renders the originals exactly as before.
What if my product photos don't have any text in them?
Then there's nothing to translate and this whole problem doesn't apply to you — a plain product photo gains nothing from image translation. This gap only matters for images with words baked in: banners, infographics, size charts, feature callouts, badges.
How accurate is the AI translation inside images?
Good enough to review, not good enough to skip reviewing. That's why the workflow has an explicit review step: you see the original and the translated image side by side and approve each one before anything goes live. Nothing is published automatically.
How much does it cost to try?
The free tier includes 10 image translations, enough to test the pipeline on your own real images. The Pro plan is $9.90/month for 100 images per billing cycle, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.