Hi everyone,
Congratulations to the Shopify team on the recent release of the 2048 variant limit – it’s a massive improvement and something many of us have been waiting for! 
However, I’m a bit puzzled about one thing: whilst we can now create products with up to 2048 variants, the media limit per product remains capped at 250 files (images, videos, 3D models combined).
For products with visual variants (e.g., different colours, patterns, or finishes), this creates quite a bottleneck. A product with 2048 variants could theoretically need many more than 250 images to properly showcase each option – especially if you’re following best practices of showing multiple angles or lifestyle shots per variant.
What’s more, we’re already running into this 250-image ceiling with several of our merchants. They have products with dozens of variants and legitimate needs for multiple images per variant, but they’re hitting the limit and can’t properly showcase their full range.
I understand that most merchants won’t need all 2048 variants, and perhaps Shopify’s thinking is that 250 is sufficient for the majority of use cases. But it does seem like there’s a bit of a mismatch between these two limits. If a product has, say, 500 variants with distinct visual differences, you’d only be able to assign images to a fraction of them.
Has anyone else run into this limitation? Are there any plans to increase the media limit to better align with the new variant capabilities, or is there a technical reason why 250 remains the ceiling?
Would love to hear thoughts from the community and perhaps get some insight from the Shopify team if possible.
Cheers!