In 2026, more and more online stores are using generative AI tools to produce or retouch their product visuals: replacing the background with a staged scene, generating a "lifestyle" variant from a simple photo on a white background, automatically correcting lighting or framing. These tools make it possible to vary a catalog's visuals without a shooting budget or a photo studio, and they're especially widespread on catalogs that renew their visuals often — fashion, home decor, seasonal products.
The catch is almost always overlooked: these generators export at high resolution by default, often as uncompressed PNG or maximum-quality JPEG — designed to be retouched one last time before publication, not to be put online as-is. Frequent result: an AI-generated visual, once uploaded straight into the media library, weighs noticeably more than the original photo it's meant to replace or complement. On a product page, the image remains the heaviest element on the page and the most common cause of a poor LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) score — a poorly exported AI visual makes exactly the problem the store was trying to solve by improving its visuals worse.
ImagePipe doesn't treat these images any differently from others — and that's precisely what protects them. The engine never looks at the weight or format of the original file stored in the media library: on the first real visit to the product page, it generates the variant matching the preset in use (product_card, product_page…) and the format the visitor's browser negotiates, without ever modifying or replacing the original file. A multi-megabyte AI export in PNG follows exactly the same path as a classic JPEG photo of a few hundred kilobytes: only the cached variant matters for the speed the visitor perceives.
In practice, that means an AI-generated visual can be uploaded as-is into the media library, with no manual compression step before publishing — a real time saver on a catalog that regularly renews its visuals this way. The trend shows no sign of slowing down: the more AI generation and retouching tools become widespread, the more stores will need a link in the chain that systematically optimizes, whatever the file's origin — a studio photo, a smartphone shot, or an export from an image generator.