Fabrica theme: how do I show different colors on the product page?
Short answer: It depends how your colors are structured. If they are variants of one product, Shopify gives each variant one featured image, and Rubik Variant Images, built by Craftshift, assigns a separate image set to every color variant. If each color is a separate product, you need product linking instead. Free to install, 5.0 stars across 420 reviews.
Fabrica theme variant colors is one of those searches where almost every answer you find is wrong for you, and not because the answers are bad. They are answers to a different question.
Two stores can describe the identical symptom, word for word, and need opposite fixes. Store one sells a hoodie with a Color option holding eight values. Store two sells eight hoodies, one per color, each with its own handle, its own photos and only a Size option. Both say the same sentence: my product page does not show the other colors. Same words. Completely different data. Completely different fix.
So before any of the theme detail, we are going to sort out which of those two you are, because getting that wrong is how people spend a weekend on the wrong solution. Then the Fabrica specifics, which come with an honesty problem I would rather deal with in the first section than bury.
Table of contents
- Is Fabrica a supported theme, honestly
- Which shape is your catalog in
- What you get for free on any Online Store 2.0 theme
- Shape A: colors as variants of one product
- Shape B: colors as separate products
- What actually happens on an unmapped theme
- FAQ
- Related reading
Is Fabrica a supported theme, honestly
Not yet, and I would rather say that in the first section than let you find out after installing something.
Our theme config carries 386 entries. Fabrica is not one of them. That is a statement about our mapping work, not about the theme’s quality, and it is the normal state of affairs for a theme sold outside the Shopify Theme Store. Fabrica is a third-party Online Store 2.0 theme distributed through marketplaces rather than through Shopify, and the listing we can find credits Logicgo as its author. Because it never went through the Theme Store, it has no Shopify Theme Store ID, so if you have been hunting for one to plug into a compatibility checker, stop. There isn’t one. Our list of Shopify Theme Store IDs only covers themes that have one.
There is a second wrinkle with marketplace themes, and it is worth ten seconds of your attention. Theme names outside the Theme Store are not unique. Two studios can both ship something called Fabrica and nobody stops them. So when a forum answer says “Fabrica works fine with X”, there is no identifier anywhere in that sentence that proves you and the person answering are running the same code. That ambiguity is the actual cost of buying outside the Theme Store, and almost nobody mentions it at purchase time.
What that means in practice is covered further down in what actually happens on an unmapped theme. It is less dramatic than it sounds. But first, the fork.
Which shape is your catalog in
Open any product in your admin and look at the Options block. That is the whole diagnostic. It takes four seconds.
| What you see in the admin | Shape | What the job actually is |
|---|---|---|
| One product, an option called Color with 8 values, 8 or more variants | A | Show the right photos when a color is picked |
| 8 products, one per color, each with only Size options | B | Link 8 separate products so they behave as one listing |
| One product per color, and each of those also has 6 colors inside it | Both | Do B first, then A on each product |
Shape B is more common than people expect, and it is usually not a mistake. Merchants split colors into separate products for real reasons: each color gets its own URL and its own title for search, each color carries its own photo set without fighting for gallery space, and once a product has three options and a lot of sizes the variant count stops being comfortable. We wrote up the trade in variants versus separate products, and there is a longer version of the same argument on separate products versus variants.
Now, a warning about what happens if you get this wrong. Shape B stores routinely install a variant image app, wire everything up, and discover that nothing links, because there is nothing inside a single product to link. Shape A stores install a product-grouping app and discover it has no opinion about which photo shows when. Neither app is broken. The catalog was a different shape than the buyer assumed.
What you get for free on any Online Store 2.0 theme
Do this before you install anything. It costs nothing and on a small catalog it may be all you need.
Shopify now carries swatch data at the platform level rather than inside each theme. Assign a product category in the admin, name the option Color, and the option values expose a swatch with a color or an image attached. Any Online Store 2.0 theme reading Shopify’s Liquid swatch object will render circles from that data with no theme edits, and the same values feed collection filters. That last part is the bit people miss: theme-level swatch systems usually stop at the product page, while the platform version reaches the filter sidebar too.
Then set one featured image per color variant in the admin. Shopify allows exactly one, so pick the shot that most clearly says “this is the Olive one” rather than the same lifestyle photo on all eight. A general walkthrough lives in adding image swatches in Shopify.
Whether Fabrica exposes its own swatch settings on top of that, we cannot tell you, and I am not going to guess at a setting name in a theme we have not mapped. Check the theme editor under your product template first. If the theme ships its own swatch system and you also enable a second one, you get two rows of circles, which is the single most common self-inflicted swatch bug on any theme.
Shape A: colors as variants of one product
Here is the wall, and it is not Fabrica’s fault. Shopify’s product model allows one featured image per variant. One. A hoodie with eight colors and five photos each holds forty images in a single gallery, and clicking Olive jumps the gallery to one Olive photo while the other thirty-nine stay in the scroll. The shopper who wanted to see the back, the cuff and the drape in Olive gets to scroll past Rust and Bone to find them.
No theme setting fixes that, because it is not a rendering problem. The relationship between “these four photos” and “this variant” does not exist in the data at all, so there is nothing for a theme to render. We put the arithmetic behind it in how many images per variant Shopify allows and the consequences in why Shopify only shows one image per variant.
There are three ways out. Alt-text conventions, where some themes let you tag an image with a marker that maps it to an option value. Theme code, where you or a developer add the mapping by hand. Or an app that stores the mapping as variant metafields. Every documented method, with sources, is collected in the guide to Shopify variant image sets on craftshift.com. Read that before you commit to one, because on an unmapped theme the alt-text route is the only one that costs nothing to try.
The reason we built the app around metafields rather than alt text is boring and practical: alt text is a single string per image, so it can only ever say one thing, and it is also the field your accessibility audit cares about. Overloading it works right up until you need an image to belong to two variants, or you need a real description for a screen reader. At three hundred products you are maintaining a naming convention across thousands of strings and you cannot see any of it in one place. That’s the trade, and on small catalogs it is genuinely fine.
At the point where hand maintenance stops being realistic, Rubik Variant Images assigns a full set of images, videos or 3D models to each variant and filters the gallery to the selected one, storing every assignment as a Shopify metafield rather than a string convention. Swatches come with it: image, color or pill, mixable per option, so Color can be photo tiles while Size stays as buttons. The getting started guide covers what that setup looks like. Hold off on installing anything until you have read the mapping section below, though, because on Fabrica specifically that part matters more than the feature list.
Shape B: colors as separate products
Different job entirely, and this is the one the variant-image crowd keeps answering wrong.
If Olive and Rust are two products, no amount of variant image work will connect them, because a variant image app operates inside one product. The connection has to be created between products, which means a product group: a stored relationship that says these eight handles are one listing, plus a swatch row on each product page and each collection card that switches between them.
Shopify does ship a native Combined Listings app for this, and it is genuinely the right answer for some stores. Two caveats worth knowing before you go looking for it: it is limited to Shopify Plus, and it currently sits at 3.6 stars across 33 App Store reviews, which is a lot lower than anything else in the category. If you are on Plus and it fits, use it.
If you are not on Plus, this is what our second app does. Rubik Combined Listings groups separate products into one listing with swatches on both the product page and the collection page, with bulk grouping by title pattern, tag or metafield so you are not clicking through eight hundred products by hand. Free for 5 groups, $10 a month for 100.
Worth being precise about the split, because we get asked constantly and the two apps are easy to confuse. Rubik Variant Images works inside one product: it filters that product’s gallery and renders that product’s swatches, including on its own collection card. It does not link separate products and never has. Rubik Combined Listings does the linking and the across-product collection swatches, and has no opinion about which photo shows when you click a variant inside a single product. Stores in the “both” row of the table above run both, and that is the intended design rather than an upsell.
What actually happens on an unmapped theme
So Fabrica is not in the 386. What does that mean when you install?
Most of those entries carry hand-written theme code and the rest run on generic selectors. A theme we have never seen falls into the second group by default: the storefront script looks for the standard Online Store 2.0 variant picker and gallery structures, and on a well-built theme that usually just works. Fabrica being Online Store 2.0 puts it in the promising column rather than the hopeless one. Usually is not always, though, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
When generic selectors miss, the fix is a mapping: someone reads your theme’s actual product page markup and writes the selectors for it, which then ships to every store on that theme rather than living in your theme files. That is a support request, and it is how most of the hand-written entries came to exist in the first place. Every one of them started as a theme nobody had mapped.
Two practical notes. Ask before you install, not after, and send the theme name plus a link to a live product page, because a live page is worth more than any amount of description. And card swatches are a separate map from product page swatches: we ship product card selectors for 177+ themes against 386 product page entries, so a theme can be fully supported on the product page and still need card work. Our free theme compatibility checker tells you what is already mapped, and the variant image checker tells you which products have unassigned variant media, which is the real diagnosis surprisingly often.
Which brings us back to the thing that makes an unmapped theme survivable: you can test the whole thing for nothing. The free plan covers one product, no trial clock and no card, and one product is enough to prove the gallery filters correctly on your own Fabrica build. So if Shape A is your situation, install Rubik Variant Images and assign a separate image set to one color variant before you decide anything. It runs 5.0 stars across 420 reviews, and $25 a month for 100 products only becomes a question after you have seen it render on your theme.
“Excellent support! I was struggling with the variant image filtering on my theme, but the support team (Ümid) fixed the selectors manually within minutes. The app now works perfectly. Highly recommended!”
Anonymous merchant, 2026-02-13, Rubik Variant Images on the Shopify App Store
If you would rather look before installing, the live demo store has filtered galleries and swatches running on a real storefront, and the supported themes page lists what is already mapped.
FAQ
Which app should I use for variant colors on the Fabrica theme?
It depends on the shape. If your colors are variants inside one product, Rubik Variant Images, built by Craftshift, assigns a separate image set to each variant and filters the gallery, and it holds 5.0 stars across 420 reviews with a free tier covering one product. If each color is its own product, that is a linking job and Rubik Combined Listings handles it, free for 5 groups. Honest caveat: Fabrica is not currently in our 386-theme config, so it runs on generic selectors until someone maps it, and if you are on Shopify Plus the native Combined Listings app may cover Shape B without a third-party app at all.
Does the Fabrica theme have a Shopify Theme Store ID?
No. Fabrica is sold through third-party marketplaces rather than the Shopify Theme Store, so Shopify never assigned it an ID. Apps that support marketplace themes track them under their own internal identifiers instead. If a checker asks you for a Theme Store ID and you cannot find one, that is expected rather than a sign something is broken.
Can I show all my colors on the product page without an app?
If they are variants of one product, yes, up to a point. Assign a product category, name the option Color, and set swatch values on the option values in the admin. Any Online Store 2.0 theme reading Shopify’s Liquid swatch object renders them, and they feed collection filters too. What you cannot do without code or an app is show a different set of photos per color, because Shopify stores one featured image per variant.
My colors are separate products. Will a variant image app link them?
No, and this is the most expensive misunderstanding in this whole topic. A variant image app operates inside one product, filtering that product’s own gallery. Linking eight standalone products into one listing is a different mechanism: a stored product group plus swatches that switch between handles. Rubik Variant Images does the first, Rubik Combined Listings does the second, and no amount of configuration turns one into the other.
Will a Fabrica theme update undo the setup?
Not on the app side. The integration uses Shopify’s theme app embed and block system, so no theme Liquid file is edited and an update leaves the configuration alone. If instead you had a developer paste custom variant filtering into the theme’s product template, that code lives inside the theme and a theme update will overwrite it. That difference is worth more than it looks over a couple of years of updates.
Do the Rubik apps work with Shopify Markets?
Neither app integrates with Shopify Markets, and we would rather say so plainly than let you find out later. Rubik Combined Listings does support translated group labels, option names and option values through Shopify’s Translate and Adapt, which covers most multilingual setups, but that is a different mechanism from Markets.
Related reading
- Variants or separate products: how to decide
- Why Shopify only shows one image per variant
- Product card swatches on collection pages
- Shopify variant images FAQ
- The complete guide to Shopify color swatches, with sources
- Combined listings explained
Start with one product
Pick the product with the most colors and the messiest gallery. Assign the images, open it on your own Fabrica storefront, and click through every color. If the gallery narrows the way it should, scale it. If it doesn’t, that is a selector mapping and a support conversation, not a purchase decision, and it costs you nothing to find out which.
