Commerce layouts that survive a thumbnail
Square is the lingua franca
Amazon’s zoom story wants large 1:1 stills (public guidance has long cited 1000 px minimum, with 1600+ helping zoom). Our square canvas is 1080 CSS, ~2160 captured — enough for a collage slot. Do not hide required “main image” rules: many marketplaces want a pure product on white as image 0. Use a collage as a secondary image: features, scale, colorways, or pack contents. Shopify and Etsy are more forgiving on the hero, but a 1:1 board still thumbnails cleanly in collection grids.
Before/after and variant walls
Two-cell splits are the honest transformation (stain, repair, styling). Keep lighting matched or the comparison looks like a trick. Four- and six-cell equal maps are colorways or sizes — no hero cell, so no SKU looks like the favorite. Background remover in the ecosystem is for cutouts before they enter a cell; this studio will not key green screen for you. Lifestyle plus pack-shot on a mixed map works when the left cell is the emotion and the right cells are facts.
What we will not list as fake modes
There is not a separate “real estate collage maker” engine, nor a restaurant engine, nor a jewelry engine. Those jobs are the same three ratios and the same maps: rooms as a four-up, plates as a six-up, SKUs as a nine-up if you accept tiny cells. If a page enumerates twenty industries in one paragraph, that is stuffing. Your vertical changes the photos and the claim, not the CSS.