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USE CASE

Generate on-brand product imagery

Use case: Generate product and lifestyle imagery without a photo shoot

Product photography is one of the slowest, most expensive parts of running an ecommerce catalogue: a proper shoot means booking a studio, a photographer, and often the physical product itself, then waiting days for edited files to come back. Webanto's image-generation use case replaces that bottleneck for a meaningful share of your catalogue — on-brand product shots and lifestyle scenes generated directly from a text prompt and, optionally, a reference image. Generation runs on flux.2-dev, a diffusion model Webanto self-hosts under a commercial licence on dedicated GPU hardware, called through POST /api/v1/images. Output is billed per image and scales with resolution, so a standard 1024x1024 hero costs a small, predictable number of credits — cheap enough to generate several variants per SKU and pick the best one instead of committing upfront to a single shoot result. Image generation is temporarily paused while the GPU that runs flux.2-dev is reallocated, so this use case is not currently accepting requests — the rest of the platform is unaffected, and this page describes what returns when the model is back online.

What to expect

  • Faster turnaround from creative brief to usable image — no shoot to schedule, no studio dependency, no waiting on delivery of edited files.

  • Cheap enough per image to generate several prompt variants for the same product and pick the strongest one, rather than being locked into a single photographer's take.

  • Consistent visual style across a large catalogue, since the same prompt structure and reference image can be reused across similar SKUs.

  • Predictable, usage-based cost that scales with catalogue size rather than a fixed day-rate shoot fee, so smaller catalogues aren't paying studio minimums.

How to set this up

  1. 1

    Generate a Webanto API key from Settings > API and store it as WEBANTO_API_KEY in your environment — never in client-side code.

  2. 2

    Pick a pilot category (20-30 SKUs) and write a prompt template that fixes brand-consistent elements — lighting style, background, camera angle — leaving the product description as the variable slot.

  3. 3

    Call POST https://api.webanto.com/api/v1/images with model set to flux.2-dev, your prompt, and 1024x1024 resolution to test the template against a handful of products before scaling up.

  4. 4

    Budget the run: a 1024x1024 image costs roughly 5 credits, and larger formats scale at about 4 credits per megapixel, so 200 hero images a month at standard resolution runs 200 x 5 = 1,000 credits — comfortably inside the Growth plan's 50,000/mo allowance.

  5. 5

    Route every generated image through a manual review step before publishing, checking for garbled text, anatomical errors, and anything that could be read as a real, specific product or person you don't have rights to depict.

  6. 6

    Wire the approved images into your product pipeline — for example a webhook that fires on new-product creation — so generation becomes a step in the catalogue workflow rather than a manual one-off task.

  7. 7

    Monitor credit usage on the dashboard and pick a plan tier that covers your steady-state monthly image volume plus headroom for seasonal campaigns.

Products that power this use case

Frequently asked questions

  • Can I generate images of our actual products, or only generic ones?

    You can steer flux.2-dev toward your product's shape, colour, and packaging using a detailed text prompt, but the model doesn't have your exact product in its training data, so results are an interpretation rather than a photorealistic copy. For anything that needs to match a real SKU precisely — exact packaging text, exact colourway — treat generated imagery as concept and lifestyle work, not a replacement for a photo of the actual item.

  • Is it legal to generate lifestyle images with people in them?

    Generated people are synthetic, not real individuals, which avoids one set of consent problems, but you take on a different risk if the output resembles a real person closely enough to be mistaken for them, or if it depicts a real branded product other than your own. Review generated imagery with that in mind before it goes into paid ads or packaging, where the exposure is highest.

  • How much does a batch of product images cost?

    Image generation is billed per image and scales with resolution: roughly 5 credits for a 1024x1024 image, or about 4 credits per megapixel at other sizes. A credit is worth $0.01 at overage rates, so 1,000 images a month at standard resolution is roughly 5,000 credits — well inside the Scale plan's 200,000/mo allowance with room for other API usage.

  • Can I get the exact same product from multiple angles?

    Consistency across angles is the hardest part of prompt-based generation — the model doesn't retain a fixed 3D representation of your product between calls. Using a reference image as an input helps steady the product's proportions and colour, but expect some variation, and expect to be selective: generate several angles per product and keep the ones that match closely rather than assuming every generation will be identical.

  • Does this replace our photographer?

    For high-volume categories like commodity homeware, apparel basics, or seasonal variants, it can replace a large share of routine shoots. For hero shots, flagship products, and anything where photorealistic accuracy to the physical item matters — a phone's exact screen glow, a fabric's true texture — a real photograph is still the safer choice. Most catalogues end up using a mix of both.

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