Previews
The Image Editor gives you two levels of preview so you always know what you're about to publish: an instant live preview as you edit, and an exact composite on demand.
Live preview — the Next Image column
As you edit, the Next Image column stacks your layer PNGs directly in your browser and shows the result immediately. It's:
- Instant — it updates the moment you change a cell or run a column swap.
- Free — it runs entirely in your browser, so browsing and editing cost nothing on our servers.
- Visually faithful — browser blending closely matches the final output, so what you see is what you'll get.
This is the default preview everyone sees, side by side with the Current Image so before and after are always visible.
Full-size preview
Click the per-bucket Preview (eye) icon to open the live composite in a larger modal — the same browser-rendered image, enlarged so you can inspect detail.
Exact composite
Inside the preview modal, click Generate exact composite to render the byte-exact server version — the identical image that Apply will upload to Shopify (same compositing engine, same encoding).
- This is the only time the server composites during editing, so it runs only when you ask for it on a single bucket.
- Identical layer stacks are content-addressed and cached — if the same stack was already composited (for this bucket or any sibling bucket in the edit), it's served from the existing file instead of recomputed.
- The rendered image is also cached in your browser, so reopening the modal re-shows it instantly.
The live preview is enough for almost all editing. Generate the exact composite when you want to confirm fine detail (anti-aliasing at edges, compression) before a large apply.
What's next?
- Applying & reverting — Turn the previewed edit into a live job.
- The layer grid — Where the Current and Next columns live.