eBay Hacks

Make Clickable Thumbnails

Use thumbnails for more professional-looking auction photos that load more quickly.

If you’re hosting your auction photos [Hack #59], you have the freedom to include as many images as you like at no additional charge. But you’re also responsible for inserting those photos into your auctions and presenting them in a way that is efficient and appropriate.

An average eBay auction page is about 40 kilobytes in size, not including any photos you might include. (There’s also about 50 KB of JavaScript code and 15 KB of eBay images, but these will be quickly cached and ultimately loaded only once.) The size of an average, medium-sized JPG file is about 50-60 KB, which more than doubles the amount of data your bidders will have to load to view your auction.

Thumbnail photos are much smaller than their full-size equivalents, both in physical dimensions and in the amount of data that must be transferred. This means that by replacing several full-size photos with thumbnails, your auction will not only appear tidier but will load faster as well.

Preparing the Images

Thumbnails are nothing more than smaller versions of full-size images, so you’ll need to make two versions of each photo.

Warning

Don’t even think about using the width and height parameters of the <img> tag to “shrink” down large photos. Not only will your images look awful, but they’ll load much more slowly than true thumbnails.

Start by duplicating each of your image files. In Windows, for example, ...