eBay® PowerSeller Business Practices FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter 23. Getting Your Photos Web-Ready

You may hear all kinds of myths — such as "more is better" — regarding images for eBay, and personally, I refuse to perpetrateany more. Because you already know how to take a reasonable picture of your product (provided, of course, you've read the how-to information from the preceding practices in this part), I use this practice to show you how fast you can get the photos you take — or the scans you make — spruced up for eBay.

Note

No eBay seller should spend hours playing with and perfecting images for eBay listings (although some do). One pass through a simpleimage-editing software program gets any reasonable picture Internet-ready.

Here's a checklist of tried-and-true techniques for preparing elegant, fatfree, fast-loading images to display on eBay:

• Set your image resolution at 72 pixels per inch. You can do this with the settings for your scanner. Although 72 ppi may seem a low resolution, it merely nibbles computer memory, shows up fast on a buyer's screen (even over a dial-up connection), and looks great on eBay.

• When you're using a digital camera, set its resolution to no higher than the 800×600 format. That's custom-made for a VGA monitor. You can always crop the picture if it's too large. You can even save the image at 640×480. It will display well on eBay but take up less space — so you can add more pictures!

• Make the finished image no larger than 480 pixels wide. When you size your picture in your image software, it's ...