Skip to Content
eBay Hacks
book

eBay Hacks

by David A. Karp
August 2003
Beginner
368 pages
9h 38m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from 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, highlight ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

David A. Karp
What Successful Project Managers Do

What Successful Project Managers Do

W. Scott Cameron, Jeffrey S. Russell, Edward J. Hoffman, Alexander Laufer
How to Overcome a Power Deficit

How to Overcome a Power Deficit

Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596005644Catalog PageErrata