eBay Business All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4: Getting Your Photos Ready for eBay

In This Chapter

• Getting the photo's file size right
• Considering photo-editing software
• Touching up your photo

In this chapter, I show you how fast you can get the photos you take — or the scans you make — ready for presentation online. No eBay seller should spend hours playing with and perfecting images for listings (although some do). One pass through a simple image-editing software program gets any reasonable picture Internet-ready. In this chapter, I tell you only what you need to know to appropriately resize and touch up your item photos.

Then, after your pictures are, well, picture-perfect, look to Chapter 5 in this minibook for some easy ways to upload your images to the web.

Size Matters

The prime concern to have about the pictures you put on eBay is size — that's right; in this case, size does matter. If you are using eBay's Picture Hosting services, images need to be at least 500 pixels on the longest side because the service converts them to optimal resolution for the page. When you use your own hosted images in the listing description, you need to optimize the files to a reasonable size yourself. The picture file size needs to be limited so you don't bog down the prospective buyer's viewing of description (especially if you're using multiple images). Why? That's easy. The larger your item's picture files, the longer the browser takes to load the item page. And four out of five eBay users will click back out to avoid a long ...