If you sell physical products, your phone and camera roll are probably full of item photos — and your buyers keep asking for "the catalogue." Sending 40 loose images over WhatsApp or email looks messy, eats data, and makes it hard for a retailer to place an order. This guide shows wholesalers, distributors, and agency owners how to turn a folder of product photos into a clean, ready-made PDF or PowerPoint catalogue in minutes, for free, using the Image Compressor on Apps2Help.
The daily pain: scattered product photos
Every wholesaler knows the routine. A buyer messages asking for your latest range. You scroll your gallery, forward a dozen heavy images one by one, and half of them arrive compressed into mush or never download. There is no order, no pricing context, and nothing the buyer can save and circulate internally. You look less professional than you are, and slow follow-ups cost you the sale.
The fix: one organised file your buyers can keep
Instead of loose photos, hand buyers a single document. Open the Image Compressor, add all your product shots, let them shrink to a sensible size, then use Download All in PDF for a catalogue they can scroll and print, or Download All in PPTX for a slide-style deck you can annotate with names and prices. One tidy file, easy to email, easy to forward, easy to keep on file for reorders.
Why a PDF or PPTX beats loose images
A compiled catalogue keeps your products in a deliberate order, stays small enough to send anywhere, and signals that you run an organised operation. Distributors can drop it into their own buyer chats; agency owners can attach it to a pitch. Because the images are compressed first, the whole file loads fast even on a patchy mobile connection — important when your buyers are on the move.
How to build your catalogue in four steps
- Open the Image Compressor and add all your product photos.
- Let them compress so the final file stays light.
- Choose Download All in PDF for a printable catalogue, or Download All in PPTX for an editable deck.
- Send the single file to buyers, or add prices and product codes in PowerPoint first.
Private and free
Everything runs in your browser — your product images are never uploaded to a server, so your range stays yours until you choose to share it. There is no software to install and no cost. Build your product catalogue now.
Choosing the format before you build anything
A product catalogue is a document that has to survive being emailed, opened on a phone, printed by a distributor and possibly edited by a colleague. Those requirements pull in different directions, so the format decision comes first.
| Format | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|
| Layout is fixed everywhere, prints predictably, opens on anything | Awkward to edit, larger with many images | |
| PowerPoint | Easy for colleagues to update, good for presenting | Layout shifts between versions, fonts substitute |
| Both | Edit the deck, distribute the PDF | Two files to keep in step |
For most small businesses the right answer is the third: keep the editable deck internally, export a PDF for anyone outside the company. Sending a PowerPoint file to a customer invites layout problems on their machine and lets them see your speaker notes.
Preparing the photographs
The single biggest quality difference in a catalogue is consistency, not resolution. Products shot against different backgrounds, at different distances and under different lighting look amateurish even if each individual photograph is good.
- One background for everything. Plain white or a single mid-grey. A large sheet of paper curved up behind the product removes the corner shadow line.
- One camera position. Mark the tripod or phone stand position and the product position with tape so every shot matches.
- Diffuse light from two sides. Direct flash creates hotspots and hard shadows that make products look cheap.
- Crop every image to the same aspect ratio. Square is easiest to lay out. Mixed ratios are what makes a grid look untidy.
- Leave consistent margin around the product within the frame, so items appear at comparable scale.
Sizing images for a catalogue that emails cleanly
This is where most catalogues go wrong. Dropping 4000-pixel phone photographs into forty slides produces a 200 MB file that no mail server will accept and no phone will open smoothly.
Work out the actual display size first. On an A4 page, a product image occupying a quarter of the width is about 5 cm across. At 200 DPI, which is more than adequate for a catalogue, that needs roughly 400 pixels. Even a full-page image at 200 DPI needs only about 1,650 pixels across. Resizing your photographs to 1,200–1,600 pixels on the long edge before you place them will cut the final file by an order of magnitude with no visible difference.
A reasonable target: under 10 MB for a forty-page catalogue. That opens on a phone, passes corporate mail filters, and downloads over a poor connection.
Layout decisions that make it look professional
- One product per page, or a strict grid. Anything in between reads as disorganised.
- Same position for the same information. Product name always top left, code always bottom right. The eye learns the pattern within three pages.
- Two typefaces at most, one for headings and one for body text.
- Include the product code prominently. This is what a buyer actually quotes when ordering, and catalogues routinely bury it.
- Put pricing on a separate sheet if prices change more often than products. Then the catalogue does not go stale every quarter.
- Add contact details and a date on the first and last page. Catalogues get forwarded and separated from the email that carried them.
Before you send it out
Open the exported PDF on a phone and scroll through it. Check the smallest text is readable without zooming, that images have not been over-compressed by the export, and that no page has an orphaned heading at the bottom. Print two pages on an ordinary office printer to confirm colours are not wildly different from screen — they will differ somewhat, but a product that appears navy on screen and purple in print is a problem worth catching before a distributor sees it.
Check the file properties too. Export dialogues often carry over the author name and file path from whoever built the document, which may reveal more about your internal structure than you intended.
Why building it locally matters
Unreleased product photography, pricing and supplier information are commercially sensitive. Assembling the document in your browser means the images and the resulting file never leave your machine, so there is no third-party service holding your product line before launch. It also works without an account and without installing software, which matters if you are building this on a shared office machine.