You’ve invested in a shoot. The products look great. You upload everything to your press office, and then not much happens. No downloads, no features, no press coverage.
It’s easy to assume it’s a visibility problem. But after twenty years of connecting brands with journalists on Press Loft, we’ve seen the same patterns repeat often enough to know that visibility is rarely the whole story. More often than not, it comes down to something simpler: usability.
The products are great, but the images don’t quite fit how editors actually build features. And when someone’s working to a deadline (which is always), there isn’t time to fix, crop or adjust. They move on to the next brand in the search results, and yours doesn’t make the cut. It’s a frustrating thing to hear, but it’s also fixable once you know what to look for.
These are the five things that come up more than almost anything else:
Why drop shadows are a problem for press imagery
Drop shadows might look polished in a brand context, but the moment a journalist tries to place that image into a layout, the shadow becomes their problem to solve. Most of the time, they won’t bother. There are too many other options available, and a cleaner image is always one scroll away.
It’s worth being clear about what “clean” means here: no shadows, no gradient backgrounds, no visual effects that made sense for a campaign but create extra work in a press context. The image needs to be something a journalist can lift and use without touching it first.
How poor lighting affects your chances of press coverage
Lighting is the hardest thing to fix after the fact, which makes it the most important to get right at the shoot stage. Harsh shadows or flat, dull lighting makes products look worse than they actually are, regardless of how good the product itself is.
Soft, even lighting is what makes an image worth stopping on, and what separates the images that get downloaded repeatedly from the ones that sit untouched. If something in your current library looks flat or overexposed, it’s worth flagging for a reshoot before the next relevant editorial window opens rather than after it’s closed.
Why shot angles matter more than you think
Angled cut-outs can look dynamic in a campaign setting, and there’s nothing wrong with having them. The issue is when they’re the only option available. Roundups, mood boards and product pages work best with a clean, straight-on shot, and angled images are notoriously awkward to fit into those formats. Journalists working quickly will skip past them in favour of something that drops straight into a layout.
If you’re only uploading one cut-out per product, make it the front-facing shot.
How to check your white backgrounds are actually press-ready
This one catches people off guard more than any other point on this list, including brands that have been doing PR for years. A background that reads as white on your screen might carry a grey or beige tint that only becomes obvious once it’s placed against a truly white page layout. At that point it looks off, and a journalist on a deadline isn’t going to stop and correct it.
Check your backgrounds against a true white reference before anything goes live. If there’s a tint, get it corrected. It sounds minor, but it’s the kind of thing that removes your imagery from consideration without anyone ever telling you why.
How to get more press coverage from the same product images
Most brands think about a shoot in terms of the immediate moment it’s designed for. But a well-styled shot has more potential than that if you approach it differently from the start. A bowl staged for an Easter table setting can work for a summer entertaining feature with a few prop swaps. A candle styled for an autumn story becomes a year-round home fragrance image once you pull the seasonal elements back.
The question worth asking before and during a shoot is how many different contexts this image could work in, not just the one you’re currently planning for.
What journalists actually need from your PR imagery
Getting press coverage for your products isn’t really about achieving a certain look. It’s about understanding how journalists actually work, and making sure nothing slows them down when they’re pulling a feature together.
A useful question to ask at any point in the process is whether a journalist could take an image and drop it straight into a layout without doing anything to it first. When the answer is yes, the image does its own work. When it’s no, even genuinely great products get passed over, not because a journalist doesn’t like them but because something easier is always available.
If you’re heading into new shoots this year or doing an overdue review of what’s already live on your press office, run through each of these points before anything goes out. Small fixes at the asset stage are always more straightforward than trying to address them later.
And if you want to make sure the right journalists can find your imagery when they’re actively searching for products to feature, that’s exactly what Press Loft is built for. You can start a free 60-day trial or book a demo to see how the platform works.
