Are 3D renders and photo shoots dying for e-commerce, or just for catalogs?

Are traditional 3D studio renders and photo shoots becoming obsolete for e-commerce brands?

Been wrestling with this one internally for months and figured I'd throw it out here since I know a lot of you are running catalogs at scale too.

The numbers are hard to ignore. A traditional shoot runs €500 to €2,000 per product once you factor in the studio, the photographer, retouching, and the back and forth on revisions. And that's before you count the lead time. Two to three weeks is normal if you're doing this properly with a real team. Generated imagery can produce a usable shot in seconds, and the cost per image is a rounding error by comparison.

But cost and speed were never the whole story with product photography. The reason brands paid for real shoots was trust. A customer looks at a photo and assumes what they see is what arrives at their door. That assumption is the entire deal. And that's where generated images still trip people up, wrong stitching on a garment, a logo that's slightly off, a texture that reads as plastic when the material is actually linen. Small stuff, but small stuff that erodes trust fast in a category where returns already eat margin.

Where we've landed, and I'll say up front we have a horse in this race so take it with a grain of salt, is that the line falls between catalog and campaign.

For catalog work, the flat product shots, the color variants, the on model images for a hundred SKUs, we think the case for sticking with traditional shoots is basically gone. The accuracy bar for a catalog image is lower than people think. Shoppers already expect some variance between screen and reality. What they need is enough detail to make a decision, consistent lighting, accurate silhouette, true to color. That's a solved problem now, and paying thousands of euros and waiting weeks for it stops making sense once you can get equivalent clarity same day.

For hero campaigns, the brand shots, the ones that carry emotion and story and sit on your homepage or in a paid campaign, we still think there's no substitute for a real shoot. Not because the tech can't produce something beautiful, it often can, but because those images are doing a different job. They're not informing a purchase decision, they're building an association. That's harder to fake convincingly at the level a real creative director and photographer bring, at least for now.

So our rough rule is boring but practical, obsolete for catalogs, alive for hero campaigns. Curious whether others are seeing the same split or if you've found the accuracy problem is smaller or bigger than we think depending on category. Apparel versus furniture versus jewelry probably all behave differently here. Where are you drawing your line, and has it moved in the last six months?