DEV Community: Plot Point Technology

How to Put Product Photos on a White Background in Bulk

Plot Point Technology — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 05:53:24 +0000

You can put hundreds of product photos on a clean white or transparent background in a few minutes, for about $4 per 1,000 images, without opening an editor.

Marketplaces and stores look more professional, and often convert better, when every product sits on the same plain background. Doing it by hand takes a few minutes per photo in an editor, and design services charge per image. For a catalogue of hundreds or thousands of products, both add up fast. This guide shows how to do the whole batch at once with an AI background remover.

What marketplaces expect

Most large marketplaces ask for a plain, usually pure white, background on the main product image, with the product filling most of the frame. Rules differ by marketplace and category and change over time, so check the current image guidelines of the platform you sell on before a big batch.

The two outputs that cover nearly every case:

White background (JPG): the main listing image on marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay and Etsy, and most store themes.
Transparent background (PNG or WebP): for designers, ads, banners and composites where the product goes on a coloured or styled background.

Do a whole batch in five steps

The walkthrough uses Background Remover: Transparent PNG & White Background on Apify. It runs open-source AI models inside your own run, so the photos are not sent to a third-party service. A free Apify account is enough to start.

Open the tool page and click Try for free.
Under Image URLs, paste links to your photos, one per line (your store's image links, Google Drive or Dropbox direct links), or upload a single image.
Pick the settings for your goal (table below).
Click Start. Each image takes about a second.
Open the Output tab to preview every cut-out and download them, or download the list of links as CSV or Excel.

Marketplace main image: output JPG, background solid colour #FFFFFF, crop to subject on with a 40 px margin.
Store or catalogue: PNG or WebP, transparent background, crop to subject on.
Ads and design work: PNG, transparent background, crop off.
Portraits and team photos: PNG with the People model, transparent or a colour, crop off.

Tips for clean cut-outs

The AI does best when the product clearly stands out from what is behind it.

Contrast helps: a dark product on a light table, or the reverse, cuts out more cleanly than a beige item on a beige wall.
Hair, fur and fabric fringes: turn on Refine edges for softer, more natural edges. It is slower, so use it only where it is needed.
Glass, smoke and see-through items are the hardest case for any background remover; check those images by hand.
Check the coverage number: each result has a subjectCoverage value. Close to 0 means no clear subject was found, so look at that photo.
Large files: images bigger than 3,000 px on the longest side are scaled down first; raise the limit (up to 6,000 px) if you need print sizes.

Automate it, and what it costs

Once the settings look right, you can run them on every new product automatically.

API: send image links, get back cut-out links in one request, from your own app or script.
No-code: connect it to Make, Zapier or n8n, for example to process every new photo added to a Google Drive folder.
Schedule: run it nightly on new catalogue images.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/plotpointtech~background-remover/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"imageUrls": [{"url": "https://example.com/products/mug.jpg"}], "background": "color", "backgroundColor": "#FFFFFF", "outputFormat": "jpg"}'

1 photo: $0.004
500 product photos: $2.00
10,000 catalogue images: $40.00

Prices are for the Apify Free plan; paid Apify plans get automatic discounts. Images that cannot be read are not charged.

Plot Point Technologies builds the Background Remover on Apify. Questions: support@plotpoint.tech.

How to Screen a Customer List Against OFAC, UN and UK Sanctions Lists

Plot Point Technology — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 05:52:09 +0000

You can check a whole customer or supplier list against the official US, UN and UK sanctions lists in a few minutes, for about $3 per 1,000 names, without a compliance platform contract.

If you take payments, ship goods abroad or onboard business customers, you are expected not to deal with sanctioned people or companies. Large banks run dedicated screening systems. Small exporters, marketplaces, fintech startups and agencies usually make do with a manual search on a government website, one name at a time, or skip it entirely. This guide shows a middle path: bulk screening against the official lists, with a result you can keep as an audit trail.

The lists that matter

Three publishers cover most of what small and mid-sized businesses are asked about. Together they hold roughly 27,000 entries and tens of thousands of alternative names.

Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) (US Treasury, OFAC): people, companies, vessels and aircraft under US sanctions programmes.
Consolidated (non-SDN) lists (US Treasury, OFAC): sectoral and other targeted lists outside the SDN list.
UN Security Council Consolidated List (United Nations): individuals and entities under UN Security Council sanctions.
UK Sanctions List (UK Government): designations under UK sanctions regimes.

All four are free to download, and they change often, sometimes several times a week. A copy saved last quarter is already out of date.

Why an exact-match search misses people

Names on sanctions lists rarely appear the way they are typed into a sign-up form, so a plain text search gives false comfort.

Word order: the SDN list writes "PUTIN, Vladimir Vladimirovich"; your customer list says "Vladimir Putin".
Transliteration and accents: Arabic, Cyrillic and Chinese names have several valid Latin spellings.
Aliases: many entries carry a dozen or more alternative names, and the match is often on an alias, not the primary name.
Company suffixes: "Rosneft", "Rosneft PJSC" and "OAO Rosneft" should all be treated as the same name.

Fuzzy matching handles this by normalising both names (case, accents, punctuation, word order, suffixes) and scoring how similar they are from 0 to 100. You then review anything above a threshold you choose.

Screen a list in five steps

The walkthrough below uses Sanctions Screening: OFAC, UN & UK Lists Name Check on Apify, which downloads all four lists fresh from the government sources on every run. A free Apify account is enough to start.

Open the tool page and click Try for free.
Paste your names into Names to screen, one per line. Export them from your CRM or spreadsheet first; up to 100,000 fit in one run.
Leave Match threshold at 85 to start. Lower it to catch more spelling variants, raise it to cut false positives.
Click Start. A list of a few thousand names finishes in well under a minute.
Open the Output tab and filter by status.

Each name comes back as one of three statuses:

Clear (below the threshold): no action; keep the record.
Potential match (threshold to 94): compare date of birth, nationality and address against the official record.
Match (95 or more): hold the transaction and review before going further.

Every match lists the matched name or alias, the list it came from, the sanctions programmes, date of birth, nationality and a link to the official record, so the review takes minutes. Download the results as CSV or Excel and file them; the checkedAt time on each row is your record of when the check happened.

Make it automatic

A one-off check is a start; the lists change weekly, so the real protection comes from screening at onboarding and re-screening on a schedule.

At sign-up: call the tool from your onboarding flow and get the result back in the same request.
Monthly re-screen: schedule a run in Apify with your full customer list, and get an email or Slack alert when anything comes back as a potential match.
No-code: connect it to Make, Zapier or n8n, for example to screen every new row added to a Google Sheet.

The API call takes one request (replace YOUR_API_TOKEN with the token from Apify Console > Settings > API & Integrations):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/plotpointtech~sanctions-screening/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"names": ["Example Trading LLC"], "threshold": 88}'

Good practice and limits

A name match is an alert to review, never proof that someone is sanctioned: many people share names, and the decision rests on the other identifiers.

Review every potential match against date of birth, nationality and address on the official record before acting.
Keep the output of each run as your record of what was checked and when.
Know what is not covered: the EU consolidated list, other national lists, politically exposed persons (PEPs) and adverse media need other sources.
This is not legal advice. Screening supports your compliance process; your obligations depend on your country, industry and customers, so check them with a qualified adviser.

For most small businesses, a bulk check at onboarding plus a monthly re-screen against the four official lists is a large step up from a manual search, at a cost of a few dollars a month.

Plot Point Technologies builds the Sanctions Screening tool on Apify. Questions: support@plotpoint.tech.