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.