Shopify File Storage

Shopify's built-in Files section is fine for a logo and a few banners, but it has hard edges that growing stores hit fast: a 20 MB per-file ceiling, no real API for bulk or automated uploads, and assets locked to a single store's admin. If you sell digital downloads, ship large lookbook PDFs, host product demo videos, or run several storefronts off shared media, you end up wanting external storage that you can script against and serve from a CDN. files.link is that off-platform store — product imagery and marketing assets get permanent CDN URLs you paste into product descriptions or theme code, and gated digital products get private files behind expiring signed URLs.

The digital-downloads case is where the size cap and access control both bite. A 200 MB video course, a multi-gigabyte design bundle, or a high-res print file won't fit in Shopify Files at all. Upload it private to files.link, and after a customer completes checkout — fire a webhook (orders/paid) to your server — mint a signed URL and email it or surface it on the thank-you page.

Because the URL expires (10-minute default), the download link can't be scraped from a public page and reshared indefinitely. For ungated assets — product photos, size charts, banner images — upload public and use the permanent CDN URL directly in your theme's Liquid or in a product's media gallery via metafields.

A migration from Shopify Files looks like: export the assets you care about, re-upload each with POST /v1/files/{folderId} → PUT presigned URL → POST /v1/files/confirm-upload, then swap the old Shopify URLs in your theme and metafields for the new CDN URLs. This works the same whether you run a standard Online Store theme or a headless Hydrogen/Oxygen storefront, since you're just consuming a REST API and plain URLs.

Billing is prepaid credits rather than another monthly app subscription stacked on your Shopify plan, and there's no per-transformation fee — you store the renditions you want and serve them from the edge. files.link doesn't replace Shopify's checkout, inventory, or order logic; it's purely the asset and download backend those flows point at.