Guide
Using Weglot, Langify or Transcy? Your Product Images Are Still Monolingual
You pay for a premium translation app. Your product pages, collections, checkout and notifications all read perfectly in French and German. Then a French customer scrolls to your size chart, your feature callout banner, your "30-Day Guarantee" badge — and they're all still in English. That's not a bug in Weglot, Langify or Transcy. Text baked into an image is pixels, and translating pixels was never their job.
What Weglot, Langify and Transcy actually do — and do well
Let's be clear up front: this is not a "those apps are bad" article. All three are strong products at the job they were built for, and if you're running multilingual Shopify markets, you should probably keep whichever one you have.
Weglot
One of the most established translation platforms for Shopify and the wider web. It detects and translates your storefront's text content — pages, products, checkout, even app-injected strings — serves each language on translated URLs with correct hreflang tags, and gives you a proper translation management dashboard with machine translation plus human editing. For images, Weglot's media translation feature lets you assign a different image URL per language: you supply the localized file, Weglot swaps which one is displayed.
Langify
A long-running Shopify-native translation app. It focuses on giving merchants hands-on control over every translated string — products, collections, theme content, notifications — with import/export workflows for working with professional translators. Langify also supports language-specific image replacement: you upload a separate image for each language and it shows the right one to the right visitor. Again, the translated image itself is one you have to produce elsewhere.
Transcy
A newer, aggressively full-featured option that pairs storefront text translation (with AI translation and unlimited words on paid plans) with multi-currency conversion for cross-border selling. Transcy advertises image translation as a feature — and to its credit, the docs are clear about what that means: you pick a target image and manually upload the replacement version for each language. It's a well-built swapping mechanism, not an image generator.
Notice the pattern in all three: where image features exist, they are display mechanisms. "Image translation" in these apps means "show a different file per language" — and producing that file is left to you. That's a deliberate, sensible scope decision by their teams: rewriting text inside pixels while preserving a design is a completely different technical problem from translating a storefront's strings. It's just a decision with a cost that lands on your side of the table.
The real cost of producing image variants by hand
Run the arithmetic on your own catalog. Say a typical SKU has three images with baked-in text — a feature callout, a size chart, a badge or banner. Each one needs a designer (or you, in Canva at 11pm) to open the source file, replace the copy, check that the German — which routinely runs 20–35% longer than English — still fits the text box, and export. Multiply that per-image effort by images per SKU, by SKUs, by languages, and a modest 20-SKU store selling in two extra languages is already looking at over a hundred manual image edits before a single new product launches.
The launch cost is only half of it. The quieter, nastier half is keeping variants in sync. Your summer promo banner changes "20% off" to "30% off" — now the French and German versions are silently wrong until someone remembers they exist, finds the right source files, and re-exports every language. Nothing errors. Nothing alerts you. A paying customer in Lyon just sees last month's offer. This is the exact failure mode that makes many merchants quietly give up and leave their images monolingual — which, on a page where every string of storefront text is beautifully translated, makes the untranslated banner stand out even more.
Where KeepFormat fits: they own the text, it owns the pixels
KeepFormat does one thing: it translates the text inside your images. The AI rewrites the copy in the target language while preserving the layout, fonts, colors and background — the output is meant to look like your designer produced it, not like a machine patched it. Every result goes through a review step where you compare it side-by-side with the original before anything goes live, then you publish per language, and a theme embed automatically shows each visitor the version matching their storefront language. Your original images are never modified or overwritten.
The important framing: this is a complement, not a replacement. KeepFormat does not translate storefront text, does not manage translated URLs, and does not touch hreflang — Weglot, Langify or Transcy keep doing all of that, exactly as before. There is no migration, no settings to move, no overlap to untangle. Your translation app owns the text; KeepFormat owns the pixels. If those apps' manual image swap features are the empty picture frame per language, KeepFormat is what puts the picture in it.
Side by side: translation apps vs. KeepFormat
An honest split of responsibilities — including what KeepFormat does not do:
| Capability | Weglot / Langify / Transcy | KeepFormat |
|---|---|---|
| Storefront text translation | Yes — their core product, and they're genuinely good at it | No — KeepFormat doesn't touch your storefront text |
| Translated URLs & hreflang | Yes — handled properly, a real SEO advantage | No — that stays with your translation app |
| Image text translation (generating the localized image) | No — image features swap files you produce yourself | Yes — AI rewrites the text inside the image itself |
| Per-language image display on the storefront | Yes on some (Weglot media translation, Langify, Transcy) | Yes — automatic swap via theme embed, originals untouched |
| Design preserved (layout, fonts, colors, background) | Depends entirely on whoever produces your replacement image | Yes — layout preservation is the whole point of the tool |
A concrete afternoon: adding KeepFormat to a Weglot store
Picture a store already running French and German markets on Weglot. Storefront text is fully handled; the gap is roughly 20 promo and feature images with English baked in. Here's what closing that gap actually looks like:
- Install KeepFormat from the Shopify App Store — Weglot stays untouched and keeps serving translated text and URLs throughout.
- Select the 20 images with baked-in text and queue them for French and German — 40 translated images total.
- While the AI processes, review finished results in the compare view: original on one side, translated on the other. Approve the clean ones; re-run any where you want a different wording.
- Publish per language and enable the theme embed. French visitors now see French banners, German visitors see German ones, and everyone else sees the originals — which were never modified.
That's an afternoon including review, versus the designer-days the manual math above implies. And the next time the promo copy changes, re-running the updated source through the same flow replaces the sync problem with a few minutes of processing.
Pricing, honestly: this is additive spend
KeepFormat's free tier includes 10 images, which is enough to run the test that actually matters: your own busiest image, in your own target language, judged with your own eyes. Pro is $9.90/month for 100 images per cycle, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
To be fair about the economics: this is money on top ofyour existing translation app subscription, not instead of it. That's only justified if your images actually carry text. If your catalog is clean product photography with no baked-in copy, your translation app already covers you and you should not add another subscription. The merchants this pays for itself for are the ones with size charts, infographic panels, badges and promo banners in every listing — where the alternative is recurring designer hours, not zero.
Frequently asked questions
Does Weglot translate the text inside product images on Shopify?
No — and Weglot is upfront about this. Weglot translates your storefront's text content and its media translation feature lets you display a different image per language, but you have to supply that localized image yourself. The text baked into an image is pixels, so it's outside what a text-translation platform processes.
Transcy says it has image translation — what does that actually do?
Transcy's image feature lets you manually upload a replacement image for each language and then shows the right version to each visitor. It's a per-language display mechanism, not a generator: someone still has to design and export the translated image before Transcy can swap it in.
Do I need to uninstall or replace my translation app to use KeepFormat?
No. KeepFormat is a complement, not a replacement — there's no migration and no overlap. Your translation app keeps owning storefront text, URLs and hreflang; KeepFormat only handles the text inside your images and swaps the translated versions in per language via a theme embed.
What does KeepFormat cost on top of my existing translation app subscription?
The free tier includes 10 images, and Pro is $9.90/month for 100 images per cycle, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. It's additive spend on top of your translation app, so it's only worth it if your images actually carry text — if your product photos are clean shots with no baked-in copy, you don't need it.
What happens to my original images when KeepFormat swaps in translations?
Nothing. Your originals stay exactly where they are in Shopify. KeepFormat publishes translated versions per language and the theme embed decides which one a visitor sees based on their storefront language — remove the embed and the store is back to showing only the originals.
If a promo image changes, do I have to redo every language again?
You re-run the updated source image through KeepFormat for each language you sell in — which is the point: that's minutes of AI processing and a review pass, rather than reopening design files and re-exporting every variant by hand. The naming and per-language publishing stay managed for you.