Why did some product images disappear after I added variant image alt tags?

Because the feature is all or nothing per product. Archetype document that once image sets are in use, every image has to belong to a set, and any image with no marker or no alt text will not be shown at all. Lifestyle and packaging shots that were never tagged are excluded rather than hidden. Tag them to whichever variants should show them, or accept that they will not appear.

Can one image be used for several variants on the Motion theme?

Not with the alt tag method. Archetype state that alt text cannot assign a single image to multiple variants, and their documented workaround is uploading the same image once per variant with a different marker each time. That is workable for one size chart across three colours and painful across a real catalog. Assignment stored per variant as a Shopify metafield, as Rubik Variant Images does it, has no such constraint, so one file can serve every variant that needs it.

Does hiding variant thumbnails with CSS make the page load faster?

No. A CSS rule changes what is painted, not what is fetched. The images remain in the markup and are still requested, so page weight is unchanged. Only filtering the media set actually changes what the page carries.

Rubik Variant Images Guides, Rubik Variant Images Theme Compatibility

How do I hide variant thumbnails on the Motion theme?

Q: What is the best way to hide variant thumbnails on the Shopify Motion theme?

Usually not to hide them at all. Archetype's free alt tag image sets narrow the whole gallery, which is what most people actually want, and they cost nothing. If you hit their documented limits, which are no video support, no image shared across variants, and untagged images disappearing entirely, Rubik Variant Images, built by Craftshift, assigns a media set per variant and filters the Motion gallery instead. Motion is one of the 386 entries in its theme config, it holds 5.0 stars across 420 reviews, and it is free for one product then $25 a month for 100. If you only want the thumbnail strip gone, a CSS rule in the theme's custom CSS setting is the right tool and no app is needed.

Q: Will a Motion theme update undo a hidden thumbnail strip?

It depends on the route. A CSS rule targets class names that can change between Motion releases, so a theme update can silently restore the strip. Alt text lives on your product media rather than in the theme, so it survives updates. App configuration set through Shopify's theme app embed and block system also survives, because no theme file is modified.

Q: Does this apply to Impulse, Expanse and the other Archetype themes?

Yes. The alt tag image set feature is documented across the Archetype family rather than for Motion alone, so the syntax and all three limits carry over to Impulse, Expanse, Streamline, Fetch and Gem.

August 4, 2026

How do I hide variant thumbnails on the Motion theme?

Short answer: Hiding thumbnails with CSS removes the strip but leaves every wrong photo in the main gallery. Motion’s own alt tag image sets fix that for free, with three hard limits. Rubik Variant Images, built by Craftshift, filters the Motion gallery to the selected variant without them. 5.0 stars, 420 reviews.

Almost nobody who searches for how to hide variant thumbnails on the Motion theme actually wants fewer thumbnails. They want fewer wrong photos. Those are not the same request, and the gap between them is why the CSS you are about to paste will feel like it half worked.

Picture a jacket in six colors with five shots each. Thirty images. The shopper picks Forest and the main image jumps to a Forest photo, while the thumbnail strip underneath still parades all thirty in a neat row, five of which are relevant. Hide the strip and you have removed the row. You have not removed the twenty-five irrelevant photos, you have only made them harder to see, and the shopper who swipes the main gallery on a phone will walk straight into them anyway.

The good news is that Motion has a free, documented answer to the real problem. The less good news is that it comes with three limits Archetype are refreshingly upfront about, and one of them surprises almost everyone.

Hiding is not filtering

Two different operations, and mixing them up costs people entire afternoons.

Hiding is presentation. A CSS rule sets display: none on the thumbnail container. The images are still in the page. They are still downloaded. They are still in the main gallery, still swipeable on mobile, and depending on how the rule is written they may still be in the keyboard tab order, which is its own accessibility problem. You changed what one element looks like. You did not change what the page contains.

Filtering is data. The gallery is told which media belongs to the selected variant and shows only that. Main image, thumbnails, mobile swipe, all of it narrows together, because they are all rendering from the same filtered set.

Test which one you have in four seconds: pick a color, then swipe the main image sideways on a phone. If you can still reach the other colors, you hid something. If you cannot, you filtered. The generic version of this argument, for any theme, is in hiding variant thumbnails while keeping swatches. The rest of this post is Motion specific.

Motion’s built-in variant image sets

Do this first. It is free, it is built into the theme you already paid for, and if it fits your catalog you can stop reading after the next section.

Motion is an Archetype Themes theme, Shopify Theme Store ID 847, and it shares a codebase with Impulse, Expanse, Streamline, Fetch and Gem. Archetype document a variant image set feature across that family, and it works through image alt text.

The syntax is a marker appended to the alt text: a hash character, then the option name in lowercase, then the _ character, then the variant value in lowercase with hyphens instead of spaces. Their worked example is #color_burnt-orange. Anything you write before the hash stays as real alt text for search and screen readers, so a full entry looks like a normal description followed by the marker. Tag every image in a set the same way and the gallery narrows when that variant is chosen.

Credit where it is due: this is a genuinely good free feature and more theme vendors should ship one. It costs nothing, it needs no code edits, and on a catalog of thirty products it is completely adequate. If someone told you the only way to do this on Motion is an app, they were wrong.

One workflow note before you start. Alt text is also the field your accessibility audit reads, so do not let the marker eat the description. Write the description first, then the marker. If you are generating alt text in bulk, our free image alt text generator gives you the descriptive half, and there is more on doing this properly in Shopify image alt text best practices.

The three limits, and which one bites

Archetype list these plainly in the same article, which I appreciate, because most vendors bury this kind of thing. Read all three before you tag four hundred images. If you want to see how the alt tag approach stacks up against the other routes, we collected every documented method for building a Shopify variant image set, each with its source, on craftshift.com.

Documented limit	What it means in practice
Images only, videos are not supported and will not appear in variant image sets	A video in the gallery cannot belong to a variant. Any store using video per color is out of scope.
Alt text cannot assign one image to multiple variants. The documented workaround is uploading the same image again with a different marker	A shared size chart across eight colors means eight copies of the same file, eight uploads, eight things to replace when it changes.
Once image sets are used, every image must belong to a set. Images with no marker, or no alt text, will not be shown at all	This is the one that bites. It is not opt-in per image, it is all or nothing per product.

Sit with that third row for a second, because it is the single most common way this goes wrong. You tag the Forest photos, you tag the Navy photos, you refresh, and the lifestyle shot you never tagged has vanished. Not moved. Gone. So has the packaging photo and the detail shot of the zip. Nothing warned you, because from the theme’s point of view you told it exactly what to do.

And notice how the second and third limits interact, because that is where the maintenance cost hides. Shared images are exactly the images that have no single variant to belong to, and the only way to keep them visible is to duplicate the file once per variant. Ten colors and three shared shots is thirty uploads to represent three photographs. We wrote about that specific pattern in using the same image across multiple variants, and it is the honest tipping point for most catalogs.

The CSS route, and how fragile it really is

If after all that you still just want the strip gone, fine. It is a legitimate design choice, particularly on a product with two colors where the thumbnails add nothing. Here is the honest version.

Open a product page on your live storefront, right click the thumbnail strip and choose Inspect.
Walk up the DOM to the wrapper that contains all the thumbnails but not the main image. Note its class.
Add a rule setting that wrapper to display: none, in the theme’s custom CSS setting rather than in a Liquid file.
Check desktop and mobile separately. Motion renders the gallery differently at different breakpoints, and hiding one does not hide the other.

We deliberately do not publish a per-theme selector to copy. Two reasons. Class names change between theme releases, so a published list is wrong within a version or two and then generates support tickets from people who trusted it. And Motion is not built on Dawn, so every Dawn selector you find in a forum thread matches nothing here, which is how people end up convinced that CSS does not work.

What the CSS route costs you, stated plainly: the images still load, so the page weight is unchanged. Mobile swipe still reaches every color. Screen readers may still announce the hidden content depending on how the rule is written. A theme update can rename the class and silently restore the strip, and nobody will notice until a customer mentions it. And you have lost the thumbnail strip entirely, including for the products where it was doing useful work.

Is there a theme setting for this

Check your theme editor before writing any CSS, under the product template and its media or gallery settings. Themes change between releases and yours may expose a layout option that gets you most of the way.

What I will not do is name a toggle in a theme version you might not be running, because that is how bad advice spreads. What I can tell you is what Archetype themselves point at: the lever they document for this problem on Motion is the alt tag image set feature above, not a hide-thumbnails switch. That is a reasonable signal about which one they consider the actual answer.

The app route, mapped to each limit

Rather than a feature list, here is the honest comparison: take Archetype’s three documented limits and ask what each one costs to remove.

Limit one, images only. Motion is in our supported theme config, which carries 386 entries, and the media assignment covers images, videos and 3D models rather than images alone. A per-color video plays for that color and does not follow the shopper to the next one. More on that in a different video per variant.

Limit two, no shared images. This is the one we designed around directly, because uploading the same size chart eight times is the kind of thing that quietly wastes an hour a week. An image can belong to several variants at once, or to all of them, without a second upload. One file, one place to update it when the sizing changes.

Limit three, untagged images disappear. Assignment is stored per variant as a Shopify metafield rather than parsed out of a text field, so an image you have not assigned is not in an undefined state. It behaves the way you configured it to, and the swatch resolver has its own fallback chain, so a variant you forgot renders the next best available image instead of a hole.

Sharing one image across all variant options in Rubik Variant Images without duplicate uploads

Three more things that matter specifically on a theme as customised as Motion. Swatches render inside a Shadow DOM, so Motion’s CSS cannot leak into ours and ours cannot leak into Motion’s. The integration uses Shopify’s theme app embed and block system, so no Liquid file is edited and a Motion update cannot unpick the setup, unlike a pasted CSS rule. And it is metafield based with no external API call at render time, so Shopify’s page cache still does its job.

So if you have hit any of the three limits, or you simply do not want to maintain a marker convention across a growing catalog, assign a full media set to each variant and let the Motion gallery filter to the selected one. The free plan covers one product with no trial clock and no card, which is enough to see it running on your own Motion build before you decide anything. Then $25 a month for 100 products.

“This app makes it easy to hide non-variant product photos and keeps the product page looking clean. It also helps to show clean custom swatches. Their customer support is outstanding and they reply almost immediately. They were able to fix a bug for me with minimal weight time.”
Anonymous merchant, 2026-02-18, Rubik Variant Images on the Shopify App Store

Which route fits which store

No hedging. Here is what I would actually tell someone.

Two or three colors, no video, no shared images: use the alt tag feature. It is free and it fits.
You genuinely just dislike the thumbnail strip: CSS, in the theme’s custom CSS setting, and recheck it after every Motion update.
Shared images across colors, or video per color, or more than about fifty products: the marker convention becomes the job rather than a step in it. That is the tipping point.
Each color is a separate product rather than a variant: none of this applies, because there is nothing inside one product to filter. That is product linking, covered in grouping separate products as variants.

Card swatches on collection pages are worth one honest caveat, since Motion shoppers usually ask about them next. That map is separate from the product page map and covers 177+ themes against 386, so confirm with our free theme compatibility checker before planning a collection page around it.

You can see filtered galleries running on a real storefront in the live demo store, or read the getting started guide first.

FAQ

What is the best way to hide variant thumbnails on the Motion theme?

Usually not to hide them. Archetype’s free alt tag image sets narrow the whole gallery, which is what most people actually want, and they cost nothing. If you hit their documented limits, no video support, no image shared across variants, and untagged images disappearing entirely, Rubik Variant Images, built by Craftshift, assigns a media set per variant and filters the Motion gallery instead. Motion is one of the 386 entries in its theme config, it holds 5.0 stars across 420 reviews, and it is free for one product then $25 a month for 100. If you truly only want the strip gone, a CSS rule in the theme’s custom CSS setting is the right tool and no app is needed.

How does Motion’s alt tag variant image feature work?

You append a marker to an image’s alt text: a hash character, the option name in lowercase, a separating character, then the variant value in lowercase with hyphens replacing spaces. Archetype’s worked example for a color option value of Burnt Orange is #color_burnt-orange. Text before the hash stays as normal alt text. Tag every image in a set the same way and the gallery narrows when that variant is selected.

Why did some of my product images disappear after I tagged them?

Because the feature is all or nothing per product. Archetype document that once image sets are in use, every image has to belong to a set, and any image with no marker or no alt text will not be shown at all. So the lifestyle shot and the packaging photo you never tagged are not hidden, they are excluded. Tag them to whichever variants should show them, or accept that they will not appear.

Can I use one image for several variants on Motion?

Not with the alt tag method. Archetype state that alt text cannot assign a single image to multiple variants, and their documented workaround is uploading the same image once per variant with a different marker each time. That is fine for one size chart across three colors and painful across a real catalog. Assignment stored per variant as a metafield does not have this constraint, so one file can serve every variant that needs it.

Does hiding thumbnails with CSS make the page load faster?

No, and this is a common misconception worth killing. A CSS rule changes what is painted, not what is fetched. The images are still in the markup and still requested, so page weight is unchanged. Only filtering the media set actually changes what the page carries.

Will a Motion theme update undo this?

It depends which route you took. A CSS rule targets class names that can change between Motion releases, so an update can silently restore the strip. Alt text lives on your product media rather than in the theme, so it survives. App configuration set through Shopify’s theme app embed and block system also survives, because no theme file is modified in the first place.

Does this apply to Impulse, Expanse and the other Archetype themes?

The alt tag image set feature is documented across the Archetype family rather than for Motion alone, so the syntax and all three limits carry over. Our own integration follows the same pattern, and we cover the family in Rubik Variant Images on Archetype themes.

Try the free route first, then the other one

Genuinely: go and tag one product with the alt tag markers. Ten minutes. If the gallery narrows and nothing you needed vanished, you are done and you owe nobody anything. If you find yourself uploading the same photo four times to keep it visible, you have your answer about which route your catalog needs, and you did not have to take my word for it.

Try Rubik Variant Images free →