How to vet supplier photos from AliExpress, Temu and 1688 before importing

A practical routine for checking every image a supplier gives you, including the third and fourth photos where most problems hide.

Most merchants look hard at a supplier's first photo and wave through the rest. The first image is usually the cleanest one. The problems tend to sit further down the gallery, in the third and fourth images and in the video: a lifestyle shot, a close-up of a zip pull, a photo of the packaging. If you import the whole gallery, you own all of it.

Here is a routine you can run on any listing from AliExpress, Temu or 1688, with no tools required.

Why the whole gallery is your problem

A listing being live on a marketplace, even for years, tells you nothing about whether it is safe to copy. Those marketplaces host plenty of listings that rights-holders simply haven't got to yet. Once the product is in your store, you are the seller, and complaints come to you and to Shopify.

Shopify generally acts on rights-holder complaints. It can remove listings and restrict or close stores, and Shopify Payments can hold funds. The details change, so read Shopify's own Legal pages and Help Center rather than relying on a blog post, this one included.

The routine: open every image at full size

Do this before anything is published. Treat each image as its own check.

The product itself. Look for logos, character prints, team marks and crests, and repeating patterns that resemble a designer's monogram. Check the less obvious places too: buttons, buckles, zip pulls, soles, insoles, inner tags and hardware.
Packaging and labels. Boxes, hang tags, pouches and stickers often carry a brand even when the product looks plain.
Backgrounds and props. A model holding a branded cup, wearing branded sneakers, or standing next to a branded bag still puts that brand in your listing.
Text baked into images. Size charts, feature graphics and banners may say things like "Disney style" or "NBA edition". On 1688, much of this text is in Chinese, so run the images through a translation tool or your browser's image translate.
Video. If you use the supplier's video, watch all of it. Logos often appear for a second or two.
The words around the images. Check the title, variant names, tags and description. A variant called "Mickey" or "Nike-like" is a warning on its own.

Why photos three and four are where problems hide

Suppliers often build a gallery from several sources. The hero image may be a clean cutout, while the later images are lifted from other listings, other brands' product pages, or customer photos. That is how a branded item ends up in a gallery for a "generic" product.

Close-ups are the other risk. A detail shot made to show stitching quality can also show an embossed logo on the hardware or a print on the lining that the hero image hid.

Also ask whether the photos match what will actually ship. If the gallery shows a branded item but the description says "no brand", one of them is wrong. Ordering a sample before you sell is the only reliable way to find out. Compare it with every image in the gallery.

Sorting what you find

Whether something is a problem depends on the mark, the product, how you use it and the country you sell in. Trademark, copyright and design rights are separate areas of law, and they differ between countries. Most examples you'll read online are US-based, and they won't map exactly onto your situation. Treat the sorting below as a working habit, not legal advice.

Clear brand, character or team mark on the product or packaging: don't list it unless you have confirmed you're allowed to. Calling it "inspired by" or "style" doesn't solve this.
Brand visible only in the background or a prop: crop or replace the image, or use your own photos. This fixes the image, not the product.
Looks like a famous pattern but has no name on it: treat it as risky and keep it in draft until you've made a decision.
Genuinely unsure: leave it unpublished. If it's a product you really want to sell, ask an intellectual-property lawyer who knows your market.

It also helps to run a reverse image search on the photos you plan to keep. This can show whether the supplier took them from another brand's shop, which is a separate copyright issue from what's printed on the product.

Make it a habit, and keep a record

The routine only works if you do it every time, including for products you've sold before, since suppliers swap images without telling you. Import everything as a draft and publish only after the check. Save a screenshot of the supplier listing and a short note of what you checked and when. If a complaint arrives, you'll be able to see what you knew at the time.

If you import in volume, a manual check of every image gets tedious, and tired people skip images. That's where a tool such as MarkSentry can help. It scans product photos for characters, logos, team marks and designer prints, and can set risky products to draft with the reason noted. It reduces risk but doesn't replace your own judgment on the borderline ones.

Whichever way you do it, look at every image and the full gallery of every product, not just the first photo.