Re-hosting Amazon's images is prohibited. Resizing them is the one permission
Downloading an Amazon product image and re-hosting it on your own server is the part that is not allowed.
The advice in circulation has it the other way round. Save the file, upload it to your media library, and whatever you do, don’t edit it. Both halves of that are wrong, and the real rule is narrower than either half suggests. Re-hosting gets no permitted window at all. Editing has the program’s only express image permission attached to it, and that permission is a proportional resize.
Neither rule is in the Operating Agreement. I searched it. crop, resize, store and derivative return zero hits each. cache returns exactly one, and it is in the page’s own JavaScript rather than in the agreement. image appears four times, twice inside a definition and twice inside the all-caps liability disclaimers in Section 7. The single hit for alter is Amazon disclaiming responsibility for “ANY UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO OR ALTERATION OF … YOUR SITE”, which is about damage to your property, not a restriction on you. Read only the Operating Agreement and you will correctly conclude it states no image rule. That is a reasonable route to the wrong answer, and I suspect it is where a chunk of the confusion starts.
The definition is the only image work the Agreement does
Section 1 does one useful thing here. It puts images inside a defined term:
“In order to facilitate your advertisement of these items or services, we may make available to you data, images, text, link formats, widgets, links, marketing content, and other linking tools, application program interfaces, Alexa functionality, and other information in connection with the Associates Program (‘Program Content’).”
Then Section 12 incorporates the Program Policies by reference and the substance lives over there. That Policies page is the container I went through for the link clauses: several separately titled documents on one URL, each numbering its own sections from 1. It matters more here than it did there, because this topic runs through two of those documents and lands on a clause number that is taken twice. Operating Agreement 6(a) is the termination-for-material-breach clause. Participation Requirements 6(a) is the image clause. They are unrelated, and a bare “6(a)” can read as the opposite of what the writer meant.
Two defined terms, and the clauses do not share one
This is where the topic turns slippery, and skipping it is how people end up quoting the wrong rule at each other.
Program Content is the Operating Agreement’s term, quoted above. It covers what Amazon makes available to you, images included.
Product Advertising Content is the IP License’s term, defined in that document’s opening paragraph:
“By accepting the Agreement, or by accessing or using the Program Content, including the proprietary application programming interfaces and other tools (collectively, the ‘Creators API of’ or ‘PA API of’) that permit you to access and use certain types of data, images, text, and other information and content relating to Products (‘Product Advertising Content’) which we may make available to you, you agree to be bound by this License.”
The “Creators API of” is Amazon’s, not mine. It reads like a find-and-replace that stopped halfway.
The IP License states the relationship between the two terms outright: “Program Content includes Creators API, PA API, Data Feeds and Product Advertising Content.” So the API material sits inside the broader term. Track which term each clause uses. The alteration rule is written against Program Content. The sourcing and storage rules are written against Product Advertising Content, which is what the API and the Data Feeds hand you. Those are not the same scope, and no sentence below merges them.
Where images are allowed to come from
IP License Section 2(b), in full:
“(b) Obtaining Product Advertising Content. You may obtain Product Advertising Content by making calls to Creators API or PA API. If we provide express prior written approval, you may also obtain Product Advertising Content through a data feed (‘Data Feeds’) that we make available via Creators API Feeds.”
That is the whole enumeration. The API, or a Data Feed you hold written approval for. A browser is not on the list, and right-clicking a product page is not a call to the API.
The API also wants at least ten qualifying sales in the past 30 days before it opens. So the one listed source of Amazon’s product images sits behind a wall a new site cannot reach, and the first ten sales get made without them.
What the API returns is not a file either. From the Images resource doc:
“The Images resources returns the URLs for all available images of an item in three sizes: Small , Medium , and Large .”
Plus the height and width of each. The same page calls the _SLXXX_ size suffix “the preferred way to reference images.” Reference, not transfer. Hold onto that, because the storage clause reads like an arbitrary restriction until you notice the API was never a download.
The 24 hours belongs to the link
IP License 2(c)(h) is the clause everybody paraphrases and nobody pastes:
“You will not store or cache Product Advertising Content consisting of an image, but you may store a link to Product Advertising Content consisting of an image for up to 24 hours. You may store other Product Advertising Content that does not consist of images for caching purposes for up to 24 hours, but if you do so you must immediately thereafter refresh and re-display the Product Advertising Content by making a call to Creators API, PA API or retrieving a new Data Feed and refreshing the Product Advertising Content on your application immediately thereafter. Unless otherwise notified by us, you may store individual Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASINs) for an indefinite period until the termination of this License.”
Four retention rules in three sentences, and the image is the one with no allowance. The ASIN you may keep indefinitely. A link to an image, 24 hours. Non-image content, a title or a price, 24 hours and then a refresh call. The image file: “you will not store or cache.” No window at all, which means there is no reading of this on which the file sits in your media library for a week, and no reading on which it sits there for 23 hours either.
“You can cache Amazon images for 24 hours” is the most plausible wrong answer in circulation, and it survives because it is a misreading rather than an invention. The number is real. It is in the clause twice. It is never attached to the image.
The one edit that is permitted
The alteration rule lives in a different document, the Participation Requirements, under the Section 6 heading “Content on your Site.” The lead-in line is part of the sentence and gets dropped in every paraphrase I have read:
“You will be solely responsible for the content on your Site and ensure:”
“(a) You will not add to, delete from, or otherwise alter any Program Content in any way, including by adding additional information, except that you may resize Program Content consisting of a graphic image in a manner that maintains the original proportions of the image or truncate Program Content consisting of text in a manner that does not materially alter the meaning of the text or cause the text to become factually incorrect, or misleading.”
Note the term: Program Content, not Product Advertising Content. That is why the Operating Agreement’s definition matters. Images are Program Content, so this is an image rule.
Then read the shape. A blanket prohibition, an “except that”, and two carve-outs. You may resize an image if it keeps its original proportions. You may truncate text if the truncation leaves the meaning intact and does not make it wrong. That is the complete list of exceptions.
So a proportional resize is in, and nearly everything anyone actually does to a product shot is out. Cropping is a deletion. Overlaying a price, a badge, a star row or a “best pick” flag is the case the drafters named in advance, “including by adding additional information.” Compositing several shots into one image, recolouring, filtering, removing the background, upscaling, burning a border into the file: all of it runs into “otherwise alter any Program Content in any way.” Stretching an image to fill a container fails on the other side, because it fails the proportions condition on the one edit that is allowed.
Cutting a logo or a watermark out of the frame fails twice. 6(a) covers the deletion, and IP License 2(c)(f)(iii) separately prohibits “remove, obscure, alter, or make invisible, illegible, or indecipherable, any notice, including any notice of intellectual property or proprietary right” appearing on Product Advertising Content.
Why nobody quotes 6(a)
Because you cannot find it with the words you would use. crop, overlay and watermark each appear zero times anywhere on the Program Policies page. photograph appears zero times too. modify appears eight times and not once in the image clause. The prohibition is phrased “add to, delete from, or otherwise alter”, so alter finds it and almost nothing else does.
Search derivative and you land on IP License 2(c)(g), which contains “otherwise create derivative works” and looks like the clause you were after. It isn’t. It attaches to “the Specifications or any software included in Product Advertising Content” and it is a reverse-engineering clause. Read that, conclude no image-modification rule exists, and you have reproduced how most of the wrong answers on this topic get built. I went looking with a publisher’s vocabulary before I found 6(a), and got nothing.
SiteStripe was never on the list
“Use SiteStripe’s Image option” fails on two independent grounds, and they fail differently enough to be worth separating.
The current SiteStripe help page enumerates the feature set under Amazon’s own line “Here are the key SiteStripe features”, and the list runs to three items: Get Link: Text, Earnings, Help. The word “Image” appears zero times on that page. Publishers report the image option is gone. Amazon’s removal note on the same page names two things it took out, ‘What’s New’ and ‘Discussion Boards’, and says nothing about images, so I am not going to tell you Amazon removed it, or when.
The second ground holds either way, and it is the stronger one. Even with the button, SiteStripe would not be a licensed source, because 2(b) enumerates the sources and SiteStripe is not among them. SiteStripe and Site Stripe each appear zero times in the Program Policies and zero times in the Operating Agreement. Amazon documents it in the help centre as a link-building convenience and never names it in the licence.
That is not pedantry. Arguing only that the button is gone leaves the reader believing the method was fine until Amazon took it away.
One sentence will get quoted against this. From the API rate-limits page, on what happens when an account loses API access:
“If you lose access to Creators API , you can continue to use other product linking tools, such as Site Stripe and generate revenue.”
Amazon calls it a product linking tool and offers it as a linking fallback. It does not mention images.
The images these clauses do not reach
The circulating answers never arrive at this part, and for anyone below the API gate it is the useful one.
Both definitions are scoped to content Amazon supplies. “We may make available to you,” in both documents. A photograph you took of a product on your own desk was not made available to you by Amazon, so it is neither Program Content nor Product Advertising Content.
Manufacturer and press-kit images are excluded by an express carve-out rather than by that reasoning, and both documents draw the same line in almost the same words. Operating Agreement Section 1:
“Program Content specifically excludes any data, images, text, or other information or content relating to product offerings on any site other than the Amazon Site.”
IP License Section 2(a):
“It also specifically excludes any data, images, text, or other information or content relating to products offered on any site other than an Amazon Site.”
Follow either route and the consequence is the same. 6(a) does not restrict how you edit those images, because 6(a) governs Program Content. 2(c)(h) does not restrict storing them on your own server, because 2(c)(h) governs Product Advertising Content consisting of an image. 2(b) does not govern where you got them from, for the same reason. The tightest rules in the program apply specifically to Amazon-sourced images.
Two limits on that, and I would rather state them than let the paragraph above read bigger than it is. photograph and screenshot each appear zero times across the whole Policies container and the whole Operating Agreement, so Amazon nowhere permits your own photography either. This is a scope finding, not a permission, and the honest form of it is what the clauses cover rather than what Amazon allows. And for a manufacturer’s image, Amazon’s clauses not reaching it is not the copyright holder granting you anything. That question belongs to the brand’s own terms.
There is a second text in the same document as 6(a), in Participation Requirements Section 1:
“Your Site(s) must contain original content and be publicly available via the website address provided in the application. Original content utilizing third-party materials must contain significant commentary, analysis, or transformation to any materials you include.”
So 6(a) tells you not to transform Amazon’s images, and Section 1 asks for significant commentary, analysis or transformation of third-party materials. Section 1 is scoped to enrollment and speaks about the Site’s content overall rather than its images, so I would not push that into a contradiction, and Amazon has not said the two clauses are meant to interact. Both texts are sitting there. Your own photographs satisfy both at once. Amazon’s images can only ever satisfy 6(a).
The plainest option is the one nobody frames as an option. A comparison table with product names, your own commentary and tagged text links has no image-sourcing problem, because it has no images. that is a real editorial constraint rather than a clever route around one, and it is what Amazon’s own no-API tooling is documented to produce.
Where the sources stop
The gaps below stay open.
Presentation first, because it is the question any competent reader asks immediately. 6(a) prohibits altering Program Content. A badge positioned over an image by the page, or an image inside a rounded container, leaves the file byte-identical. Amazon does not address the file-versus-presentation line anywhere I searched, in either direction, so I am not going to tell you a CSS overlay is safe and I am not going to tell you it is prohibited.
Then there is whether an <img src> pointing at Amazon’s CDN counts as “storing a link” at all, as against a row in your database. Amazon defines “store” nowhere for this purpose. The 24 hours for a stored image link is sourceable. Its application to a tag in your markup is not.
Enforcement, which is what people are actually asking about. Amazon “may terminate this Agreement or suspend your account immediately upon written notice” for material breach, and the Policies preamble deems any violation of the Participation Requirements or the IP License a material breach. The mechanism is documented, in Amazon’s own modal verb. Whether Amazon acts on it for images, at what threshold, after what warning, or at all, is not on any Amazon page I found. Anyone telling you an image violation gets your account closed is telling you something Amazon has never published.
The images already in your library from following the old advice are their own gap. IP License Section 1 says you will “promptly stop using the Program Content … and promptly remove from your Site and delete or otherwise destroy all of the Program Content” when the licence terminates. That is a termination consequence and not an instruction to an enrolled associate, and whether Amazon expects retroactive removal from an active account is not stated anywhere.
And on sizes, one thing I am deliberately not claiming. The documented resource list stops at large, and Amazon’s own example response shows a large primary image at 500 by 500 pixels. There is no maximum-dimension table on that page, so 500 is what the example shows and not a ceiling I can hand you. The _SLXXX_ suffix mechanism is documented; where it tops out is not.
If someone tells you the 24 hours covers the image, ask them to paste the sentence. It is one sentence and it says what the 24 hours is for.
