For the second time now, I’ve hit the file storage limits on multiple Shopify accounts. There’s no efficient way to manage images, and Shopify’s automatic compression barely helps, nor do the limited apps. Even when products are deleted, the images remain — slowly stacking up and pushing growing retailers over their storage limits based on account tier.
It would be a game-changer to have visibility into how close we are to the image file limit, receive proactive notifications, and be given tools to easily compress or bulk-manage images. Right now, we’re flying blind.
Shopify’s system now reuses images across connected Collective retailers — and counts them against each store’s file limit. That caused our reversal. A year later, and still no effective tools to manage storage or even view usage levels. It’s long overdue
Hey @Fly - thanks for flagging this. I definitely understand where you’re coming from.
You’re absolutely right that having a storage usage meter, proactive notifications, and better bulk management tools would be game-changers, completely agree with you there, especially with the Collective image sharing counting against each store’s limit.
I can’t guarantee anything specifically, but on my end pass along your feedback as a feature request to the relevant product folks on our end. Like I mentioned, I can’t say for sure if these features will be rolled out, but in the past I have seen features I’ve requested on developers/merchants behalves get rolled out, and it does happen frequently.
If you’re willing to share your use case with me, as well, I’d be happy to share that internally on my end too - hope to hear from you soon!
Thanks for the reply. We’ve opened multiple cases on this, with the most recent being #58059268. This issue has dragged on far too long, and now we’re at a standstill—we can’t upload images, update marketing materials, or even send emails because of it.
The situation would be completely different if we had visibility into what’s impacting our file storage, efficient tools to manage images, and if images were actually deleted when products were removed.
On top of that, the fact that images from Collective retailers are counted against every connected account creates an unfair and unmanageable mess. We need a real solution or the insight to manage individually.
Hey @Fly - thanks for sharing the case number. I completely understand how frustrating this must be, especially if it’s blocking critical business operations.
I’ll do some looking into this on my end to see if these file management improvements are on the roadmap, and I’ll make we get an official feature request logged with all your specific pain points - particularly the Collective retailer image counting issue so that we have that logged on our end. I can’t guarantee that any updates will be made, but I can say that in the past for feature requests that I’ve put through on my end, some have become enabled for merchants/partner developers, and it does happen fairly often.
I definitely know this isn’t the immediate fix you need, but I’ll make sure your feedback gets to the right people with the full context of the business impact at the very least and loop back with you here when I have more info to share.
Looking forward to receiving positive news from you. Until then we’ll be looking for good image optimization apps, focusing on other parts of the store that need improvement and clarity into Shopify’s Terms of Service.
Hey @Fly - no worries, happy to help how I can here. I was able to speak with our product team on this for you and I can’t guarantee exact timelines, but I can confirm that we are looking at ways to improve file management.
Specifically, I can share that we’re first looking at a way of notifying folks when they’re reaching storage limits (via email or another way). I can’t say for sure how this will be rolled out, but that’s our first priority for improvement and we’re aiming for this to come out out in the medium-term. I’ve also passed along your feedback directly to them (and we’ve added it to our internal tracking).
I can’t offer any legal-related advice on the forums here, but let me know if I can clarify anything within the TOS you’re looking at there and I’ll see if I am able to share additional info - hope this helps a little bit at least
Appreciate the reply and your insight into the potential changes. Funny timing—right after I sent my message, I got a notice that Shopify’s TOS had been updated at 9:46 MST:
File size limits might only affect a small number of stores right now, but it’ll become a broader issue as Shopify continues to scale. The fact that it’s not addressed during sign-up or in the admin UI is a real miss. Like you said, we need real alerts and tools—not just buried policies. A few suggestions:
Analytics – Clear metrics showing file usage and trends.
Email Notifications – Warnings when you’re close to limits, oversized file alerts, and app suggestions to help.
Management Tools – Quick ways to spot and optimize large files; auto-delete product images when products are removed.
Collective Retailer – Shared images shouldn’t count against every store. Either optimize them on import or host them centrally.
Thanks again @Fly - really appreciate your suggestions here, I definitely get where you’re coming from in terms of making our file management system (and tracking) a bit more robust. I’ll get these passed along to the team as well
Thank you. And do realize that our shop, products, theme, emails and marketing are all failing as we speak because of these hidden limitations. We currently have over 7k missing images, cannot write SEO text or create emails with images or update theme. We have several image optimization tools running with little effect as most of the image usage is coming from the collective retailers. And as you know, even if we delete those products, all images remain.
Here’s another discovery that adds to our inability to fix the issue, even the apps used to optimize our images cannot work because there is no room to rewrite/replace original image.
Hey again @Fly, thanks for following up. I hear you - this is definitely difficult. I still can’t guarantee what features we’re working on or a timeline for that when it comes to file management, but did just want to confirm again that I’ve shared your feedback and ideas with our product team.
While we work on improving native file management, a short term solution you might want to consider would be working with a Shopify Partner to develop a custom app that could:
Store “backups” of your images externally (AWS/Google Cloud)
Remove files from Shopify to free up your quota
Serve/modify those images to your storefront as needed (so, remove ones you don’t need and then upload the ones you do need from that external server when required, sort of like “hot swapping” a memory card on computer)
Thanks for trying to help and offering options, but unfortunately, none of those work for us. I also get that a solution may take a while—or might never come. Based on feedback from other users and our own support experiences, I don’t have much confidence that Shopify will address this unless they’re legally compelled to. This is a familiar pattern: platforms focus on shiny new features to attract users while long-standing issues go ignored. If you come up with anything else—especially a flow that can identify archived or deleted products and remove their associated images—please pass it along. That would actually help.
Checking if there are any updates on your end regarding the file content storage processes, management or policy. We emailed one of the collective retailers who images are highly affecting our image storage because they are using Shopify to store high res images. As you know, these images are also being counted against every retailer who is partnered with them. They have no plans to optimize images as they use a headless site where images are optimized. Our only possible solution would be to delete the brand or disconnect but that still may leave images on our account. In addition, the modification option under file content does not reduce or change image size even after reducing dimensions.
"I checked with our ops team and we use a headless site so we store all of our compressed images there and use Shopify to store our high res images for certain use cases and channels where we need high res.
I asked if we planned to compress on Shopify but unfortunately, we have a big back log of projects and this is not at the top of the list.
Thanks for following up here @Fly - at the moment I don’t have a concrete update to share in terms of improvements to our file storage features, but I appreciate you sharing that behaviour you’re seeing when it come to reducing the image’s dimensions, happy to look into this for you as well (and to confirm if deleting/disconnecting from Collective leaving images on another merchants’ shop is expected behaviour - my understanding is that it is, but happy to double check that with our team internally for sure).
Just to make sure I’m understanding the resizing issue - are you just using the resizing feature in the admin? Does the image size stay the same if you crop/transform it as well (likely not, but just wanted to see if it could potentially be that we’re retaining the original image but just displaying it at a reduced size).
More than happy to dig into this further with you for sure.
Thanks for the reply. Regarding the resizing issue, when we simply try to resize a larger image, it doesnt seem to work and then the dimensions disappear, i.e. cant modify or tell what was done. When you go back to look at the image size, its the same. Theory would say it should be smaller but even this function is not working properly.
Here is an example of an item where we modified the dimension from 3000px to 1200px.
We’ve spent countless hours deleting products, researching image optimization apps and nothing is working. Even the image optimization apps cannot rewrite the images because there is no space and there are errors on every product page because it cannot generate thumbnails.
Hey @Fly - thanks again for your reply here, definitely understand your frustration with this as the file’s size should change when it’s resized.
I tried to replicate the resizing issue you’re experiencing, and on my test store, the resize function appears to be working correctly. I’ve recorded my process here:
Could you share a screen recording of how you’re attempting to resize images? Also, if you’re comfortable sharing your shop information (via DM if needed - I can set this up!), I can dig deeper into what might be happening specifically with that specific store or others where this might be happening. This will help me understand if there’s something unique about your setup that’s causing this behaviour.
Hope to hear from you soon - thanks again for bearing with me here, this does seem quite strange from my testing.
Thank you for the reply and the screenshot. I just tested two product images, one from collective and another imported into our store from another manufacturer. Resizing on both product images failed and reverted to prior information. I hope you can see how frustrating this is and interferes with our business operations. We have been unable to import any additional products from Collective now and over 15000 product images will not import. In addition, the tools to make reductions do not work and we cannot manage images efficiently.
When you go back into product, none of the information was accepted or changed and image is still the same size. In addition, resize dimensions are blank.
Hi @Fly - just following up on this with you. I wanted to reach out here in case my answer helps other folks seeing similar issues.
I reached out to our product team, and they were able to confirm that this is happening because your store has reached the file storage limit on your current plan. When you try to resize an image, Shopify attempts to process and generate a new preview, but that process fails due to the limit (it’s essentially treating it like adding new data, even though it’s an update to an existing file).
Unfortunately, we’re not surfacing that error clearly in the UI right now, but the team is aware and plans to improve how these errors are displayed to make it more obvious what’s going on.
I can’t guarantee an exact timeline for that fix, but I’ll definitely advocate for it on my end to help prioritize. In the meantime, as a next step, our devs suggested considering a plan upgrade to increase your storage quota or deleting unused images/assets to free up space (I know you’ve been working on that already, so let me know if there’s anything specific I can check on your behalf). If you’d like, I can also look into seeing if we can run a process to clean up any stored assets that aren’t actively linked to media, which might help reclaim some space. Feel free to DM if that’s of interest and I’ll see if we’re able to set that up for you. I’m also going to advocate internally to see if we can look into revising how the resizing mechanism works, since I do understand how it could be seen as potentially undue/ not ideal that resizing images actually initially makes them take up more space.
Appreciate you bearing with us here, and sorry this has been such a roadblock. Let me know how else I can assist!
Thanks for the response and for continuing to dig into this.
Unfortunately, everything you mentioned are things we’ve already tried or are well aware of. The core issue remains: none of the optimization apps work because there’s simply no space left to write optimized (smaller) images. Manual cropping in the file content section also fails for the same reason—no space.
Here’s a perfect example: we manually cropped an image, reduced the size, and yet it bounced right back to its original size—7.7MB like nothing happened.
We’ve done just about everything short of casting spells to resolve Shopify’s inability—or maybe unwillingness—to properly address this. We’ve already upgraded once, and further upgrades aren’t feasible. We’ve bought over 10 image optimization apps. We’ve deleted thousands of products. We even removed a high-performing Shopify Collective partner because they can’t optimize images on their end—Shopify hosts them in full high-res and they run headless. When we left a not-so-glowing review about this flaw, Shopify Collective reached out. Their proposed fix? “Just turn off media updates.” Really?
“If you’d like, I can also look into seeing if we can run a process to clean up any stored assets that aren’t actively linked to media, which might help reclaim some space.”
If you could do this, I would absolutely appreciate it! Thanks in advance.
Here is a response from a very popular image optimization app highlighting the issues with Shopify’s file space and ability to resize images for optimization.
“We were optimizing images and our system detected a lot of failures, so we checked what might be the issue and why we could not re-upload optimized images. It seems that you reached your Shopify storage limit and Shopify is not allowing us to upload optimized images. Shopify returns exactly this error: “Adding this file will exceed the file storage limit of 300GB for your plan.”I would recommend reaching out to Shopify support and ask how you can increase the storage limit. For now I disabled automatic image optimization for you as we will keep getting this error from Shopify until storage limit is increased or file count reduced.”
- no worries, happy to help how I can here. I was able to speak with our product team on this for you and I can’t guarantee exact timelines, but I can confirm that we are looking at ways to improve file management.
