Photo Reviews

Let your customers show off your products in the real world — not just tell people about them.

—

Why Photo Reviews Matter

A written review says “this dress is gorgeous.” A photo review shows it — on a real person, in real lighting, looking nothing like a studio shot. That authenticity is incredibly powerful for building buyer confidence.

Photo reviews are the closest thing online shopping has to word-of-mouth. When a potential customer sees someone like them wearing, using, or enjoying a product, it does more convincing than any product description could.

And it’s not just about trust — photo reviews create user-generated content that makes your product pages richer, more engaging, and more useful.

—

Enabling Photo Uploads

On Review Forms

1. Go to Trustie > Settings > Reviews
2. Find Photo Reviews and toggle it on
3. Configure your upload settings (see below)
4. Save

Once enabled, your review form gains a photo upload area where customers can drag-and-drop or click to select images.

On Custom Forms (Form Builder)

If you’re using the Form Builder to create custom review forms, you can add a photo upload field to any form:

1. Go to Trustie > Forms
2. Edit your form
3. Drag the Photo Upload field onto your form
4. Configure the field settings (max files, required/optional)
5. Save

—

How Customers Upload Photos

The upload experience is designed to be simple and friction-free:

1. Customer starts writing their review as usual — star rating, text, any custom fields
2. At the bottom of the form, they see an upload area: “Add Photos”
3. They can drag and drop images onto the area, or click to browse their device
4. Thumbnails appear as each file uploads, with a progress indicator
5. They can remove any photo before submitting by clicking the X on the thumbnail
6. They submit the review — photos are attached to it

Upload Limits

Customers see clear error messages if they exceed the limits — “File too large (maximum 5 MB)” or “Maximum 5 photos per review.”

—

Photo Optimisation

Every uploaded photo is automatically optimised before it’s stored. This happens behind the scenes — customers upload their full-resolution phone photos, and Trustie handles the rest:

The result: your review photos look great but don’t slow down your product pages. A 4 MB phone photo becomes a 150–300 KB optimised image.

—

Admin Moderation

Photo reviews follow the same moderation workflow as text reviews, with a few extras.

Reviewing Photos

When you view a pending review in WooCommerce > Reviews (or Trustie > Moderation), any attached photos are displayed as thumbnails. Click a thumbnail to see the full image.

For each review with photos, you can:

That last option is useful when a review is genuine but a photo is blurry, irrelevant, or contains something you’d rather not show (a messy background, someone else’s face, etc.).

What to Look For

When moderating photo reviews, keep an eye out for:

• Stock images — someone’s pasted a product image from Google rather than taking their own photo
• Irrelevant photos — images that have nothing to do with the product
• Inappropriate content — rare, but it happens
• Competitor products — “Here’s a photo of Brand X, which is better”

Most of the time, customer photos are genuine and useful. A quick glance is usually all the moderation they need.

—

The Lightbox Viewer

When a visitor clicks on a review photo, it opens in a lightbox — a full-screen overlay that shows the image at a large size against a dark background.

Features

The lightbox is built for everyone:

• Gallery navigation — if a review has multiple photos, arrow buttons let visitors browse through them all
• Keyboard navigation — left/right arrow keys to move between photos, Escape to close
• Touch support — swipe left/right on mobile devices to navigate
• Pinch to zoom — on touch devices, pinch to zoom into photo details
• Focus trapping — when the lightbox is open, Tab cycles through its controls only (close button, navigation arrows)
• Screen reader support — ARIA labels announce “Photo 2 of 5” and descriptive alt text for each image
• Reduced motion — if a visitor has “prefers reduced motion” enabled in their system settings, the lightbox opens without animation

Photo Grid

On the review card itself, photos display as a row of thumbnails below the review text. If there are more than 3 photos, the grid shows the first 3 with a “+2” overlay on the last thumbnail, indicating there are more to see.

—

Displaying Photo Reviews

Photo reviews appear alongside regular reviews on your product pages. You can also highlight them specifically:

Filter by Photos

If the filter bar is enabled on your review display (a Pro feature), visitors can filter to show “Reviews with Photos” only. This is a popular filter — many shoppers specifically want to see real customer photos before buying.

Photo Reviews in the Widget

The floating review widget can display photo review thumbnails alongside the review text. Enable this in Trustie > Designer > Widget.

Photo Gallery Shortcode

Use the reviews shortcode with the photos filter to create a dedicated photo gallery:

[trustie_reviews product_id="42" has_photos="true"]

This shows only reviews that include photos — great for a “Customer Photos” section on your product page.

—

Perkie Integration (Bonus Points for Photos)

If you’ve got Tracksies Perkie active, you can award bonus loyalty points when customers include photos with their reviews.

Configure this in Perkie > Earning under Review Incentives:

These bonus points stack with the base review points. So if your base reward is 50 points and the photo bonus is 25 points, a photo review earns 75 points total.

This is a brilliant way to encourage richer, more useful reviews. Customers who know they’ll earn extra points for adding a photo are much more likely to snap a quick picture.

See Perkie’s Review Incentives guide for the full setup (Perkie add-on required).

—

Storage & Performance

Where Photos Are Stored

Review photos are stored in your WordPress Media Library, just like any other image on your site. They live in your standard uploads directory (wp-content/uploads/) and are managed through WordPress’s media system.

This means:

• Your existing backup system captures review photos automatically
• CDN plugins (like Cloudflare or BunnyCDN) serve them from the edge
• Image optimisation plugins (like ShortPixel or Imagify) can further compress them if you like

Performance Impact

Thanks to automatic optimisation, photo reviews have minimal impact on page load:

• Thumbnails on review cards are tiny (~5–15 KB each)
• Full images load on demand (only when someone opens the lightbox)
• Lazy loading ensures off-screen photos don’t load until the visitor scrolls near them

—

Common Questions

Can customers edit or remove their photos after submitting?
Customers can’t edit or remove photos once the review is approved. If a customer contacts you asking to remove a photo, you can do this from the admin moderation panel.

What happens to photos if I delete a review?
The photos are also removed from the Media Library. Trustie cleans up after itself.

Can customers upload photos to existing reviews?
Not currently — photos must be included at the time of submission. If a customer wants to add photos later, they’d need to contact you and you can add them from the admin.

Do photo reviews get the “Verified Purchase” badge?
The verified badge is based on whether the reviewer purchased the product, not on whether they included photos. A photo review from a verified purchaser gets both the verified badge and the photo display.

Are there any restrictions on photo content?
Trustie doesn’t automatically screen photo content (like nudity detection or AI content moderation). Moderation is manual — which is why we recommend keeping review moderation turned on, especially if you sell products where photo reviews are common.

—

If Something’s Not Working

Photo upload area not showing on the review form:

• Check that Photo Reviews is enabled in Trustie > Settings > Reviews
• If using the Form Builder, make sure the Photo Upload field is added to your form
• Test in an incognito window to rule out browser extension conflicts

Upload fails with an error:

• Check the file size — is it under the 5 MB limit?
• Verify the file format — only JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP are supported
• Check your server’s PHP upload limit (upload_max_filesize in php.ini) — it needs to be at least as large as your Trustie file size limit
• Check post_max_size in php.ini — it needs to be larger than upload_max_filesize

Photos look blurry:

• Trustie resizes to 1200px max width. If photos look blurry at display size, the originals may have been very low resolution to begin with
• Check that your theme or a plugin isn’t applying additional compression

Lightbox not opening:

• Check for JavaScript errors in your browser console (right-click > Inspect > Console)
• A JS conflict with your theme or another plugin might be interfering — try deactivating other plugins one by one to isolate

Still stuck? Drop us a line at support@tracksies.com and we’ll help you sort it out.