Every image on every connected catalog feed is automatically mirrored into the product's image gallery — not a curated top pick, but all of them — and run through Aimée's image processing: background removal and classification. This gives your templates a full library of options to bind placeholders to, without any manual selection work.
Background removal#
If a catalog has "Automatically create product images with transparent background" turned on, every image is run through a background-remover pipeline before it's added to the gallery. The pipeline is an ordered list of steps you configure on the catalog: each step picks a model version, which content categories it applies to, whether it should run on the main image only, whether to auto-crop, and a minimum acceptable quality score. If a step's output doesn't clear its quality threshold, the pipeline falls back to the next step in the list — for example, "try V1, and fall back to V3 if the quality is too low."
The available model versions:
- V1 — Renable's original background-removal model. Fast and inexpensive, and works best on images with a clean, plain white background.
- V3 — Renable's newer background-removal model, and the default for new catalogs. Handles colored or busy backgrounds better than V1.
- V2 — a premium third-party background-removal model. The highest quality option and handles almost anything well, but is by far the most expensive of the three, and can occasionally over-remove parts of product packaging or cartons.
- None — skip background removal for that step; crop only.
It's common to chain models in a pipeline rather than rely on just one — for example, try the cheaper V1 first, and fall back to V3 only when V1's quality score is too low.
Overriding the result manually#
On a specific product, open its image gallery and use Make transparent (V1 / V2 / V3) on any image to force that version regardless of what the catalog pipeline chose. Each image also shows Aimée's own confidence, for example "Aimée thinks the background removal quality of this image is N%," along with which model produced it — useful for deciding whether to leave the automatic result or override it.
You can also fix up a batch at once from the project's Content page: Make all images transparent (V1 / V2 / V3) applies a version across every selected image. See Reviewing and approving content.
Image classification#
If "Automatically categorize images as product, lifestyle, staged, .." is turned on for the catalog, Aimée also classifies each image so your templates and channels can target the right kind of shot. Behind the scenes, the classifier only distinguishes three broad buckets:
- Product — the item on a plain or neutral background.
- Lifestyle — the item in a natural setting or on a model (also covers what the classifier internally calls "feature" and "staged" shots).
- Information — badges, infographics, and other non-product graphics.
The manual category picker — in the gallery, in a catalog's Features configuration, and in the Content page's bulk Change category action — lists every content category, but for an image the relevant ones are Information, Product, Lifestyle, Staged, and Feature. Use it when Aimée's automatic classification gets a specific image wrong, or when you want finer control than the three automatic buckets provide — for example, marking a specific shot as "Staged" so it's targeted by the Staged image placeholder instead of the general Lifestyle one. See Available placeholders for how each image placeholder resolves.
What approving an image locks — and what it doesn't#
Approving ("reviewing") an image locks in exactly two things: which processed version is shown (the background-removal result you or Aimée picked) and its category. That approval earns the image extra protection — if it ever disappears from your feed, it's kept archived for 30 days instead of being removed immediately, so it can come back intact if the feed image reappears.
Approving an image does not freeze it against your catalog's own settings. If you later change the catalog's background-remover pipeline configuration (for example, switching the default from V1 to V3), that change still applies — even to previously approved images. An approved image whose processing changes as a result is archived (recoverable for 30 days if you revert the setting) and a fresh, unreviewed image with the new processing takes its place. Feed-driven attributes like which catalogs an image belongs to and its position in the feed always stay automatic, whether or not the image has been approved.