Swatches

Display the colors, patterns and materials in which a product is available to customers.

What are swatches?

Swatches are small, but very useful visual indicators that display the colors, patterns and materials in which a product is available to customers.

Instead of displaying the options as plain text, swatches provide a more intuitive and engaging way for customers to interact with the available choices. You can use HTML colors, variant images or upload your own custom swatch images.

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Show product images in swatches

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HTML color

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Uploaded image

How to set up swatches

Steps

  1. Open the Theme Editor, and click on Theme Settings and open the Swatches area.
  2. Select Enable color swatches.
  3. Within the Option name setting, enter the variant option title (circled below).mode-swatch-settings-4.jpg
  4. Set the Swatch method to be Uploaded Image or HTML color. In addition, in any location except the collection filters, it's possible to show the variant image as the swatch using the setting Show product images in swatches.

Display swatches on product grid

Steps

  1. Open the Theme Editor, and click on Theme Settings and open the Swatches area.
  2. Enable Show swatches in product grid.

Variant images as swatches

Steps

  1. Open the Theme Editor, and click on Theme Settings and open the Swatches area.
  2. Enable Show product images in swatches and choose Swatch product image shape and Swatch product image alignment.

Note

To ensure that images are displayed for your product variants, it is important to add Variant images. Without them, no images will be displayed. The theme cannot anticipate which specific images you intend to display.

Custom images as swatches

If you prefer using your own images instead of HTML colors or variant images, you can upload custom images that will be shown as swatches.

Steps

  1. Create a PNG image file for each color.  A file of approximately 40px by 40px is appropriate. Maintaining consistent size and aspect ratio across all swatch image files is recommended for best results. 
  2. Name each file to match the handle of the variant color title, replacing spaces with a dash (-) and keeping the file name lowercase. For example, if the variant is named "Fire Engine Red" name the file "fire-engine-red.png"
  3. Remove any special characters, use only the Latin/Roman alphabet and standard characters (a-z) only. For instance, "waldgrün.png" should be renamed to "waldgrun.png."
  4. Open the Shopify admin area and click on Content > Files.
  5. Select Upload files to upload your images.
  6. Open the Theme Editor, and click on Theme Settings > Swatches.
  7. Under Swatch method, select Uploaded image.

FAQs

Why are my custom images not showing as swatches?

If the custom image is not displayed, it may mean a step was missed in the instructions above. Or you may have a 3rd party app installed that affects the product page. Disable any such apps to confirm and if you identify the offending app, you can contact the app's support team for assistance.

 

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