Improving your eBay Photos

Let's face it: items for sale on eBay sell much better with a photo than without. In fact, many eBay buyers won't even consider buying an item if it doesn't have a photo. But bad photos can be just as much of a deterent as no photos at all. Setting up and taking your photos are a big part of the battle - we'll look at tips to improve the quality of your photo first. Then we'll examine the digital side of your image and the most appropriate characteristics of a saved image that's ready for upload.

Improving Photo Quality

Sharpness

Make sure your photograph is sharp so that detail can be clearly seen. Blurry photos make the buyer wonder if the seller is hiding something. I've seen photos posted that were taken by a cell phone camera that were expanded large enough that pixelation could be seen - that's not good! Use a tripod if you have to, or steady your camera on a piece of furniture, but whatever you do, make sure your images are sharp!

Lighting

Lighting is important to any photo - but especially so if your eBay audience can't see the object clearly because the lighting is too dim or too bright (or worse, the reflection of camera flash blocks part of the object), then you may as well not post it. Images with badly lit subjects make you appear unreliable to eBay buyers - or at least a little suspect. If you are photographing your subject indoors, turn on some lights! Be wary of shadows that lighting can cause and the loss of detail that can occur in areas of low light. If photographing outdoors, consider using the warm lighting of sunrise or sunset to your advantage; photography experts agree that people prefer photos in orangey lighting found when the sun is closest to the horizon than mid day or indoor fluorescent lighting. Consider changing your camera angle - move to the right, to the left, or up and down - until there are no flash reflections in your subject.

Angle of View

Is your eBay item 3-dimensional? This may seem like a silly question, but remember that photos are only 2-dimensional. Show off all sides of your eBay auction item by photographing it from multiple angles. Even if one side of that amplifier has nothing on it, or the back of that grand piano is boring, show it anyway! Photographing all angles lends credibility to your sale, and gives the prospective buyer confidence that you're not hiding anything.

Background

This one gets a little tricky, but be careful of busy backgrounds. The best thing to do is drape a white or black sheet somewhere - I like to put mine on a sofa - and place your image on it. Obviously, this will depend on the size of your eBay auction item, but the concept is the same regardless: remove distracting things from the background! For example, if you're trying to sell your livingroom lamp, don't show me the sofa and table next to it with flowery wallpaper on the background - it not only makes it hard to distinguish the product, but it can also cloud a buyer's judgement as to whether they like the item, based on the other objects around it. If I don't like the wallpaper behind the lamp, I might find it hard to see it in my flashy red livingroom. More advanced photographers can try reducing depth of field, assuming the item fits nicely in a restricted plane of view.

Image Characteristics: the Digital Aspect

Image type

JPEG (or JPG) is probably the best file type for photos you want to post on eBay. It has a reasonable colour range for photographs, and offers good compression. It is viewable by all web browsers and image-editing programs.

File Compression

Compress your JPEG image to reduce the size of the file, but not so much as to degrade image quality. If you compress the image to much, the image will begin to look grainy. If you compress it too little, it will take a long time for the eBay buyer's web browser to display it, possibly driving away business. For publishing on the web, compression of Medium or Medium-High scale is appropriate, so keep this in mind when your image-editing application prompts you to select a compression amount.

Image resolution and size

96 dpi (dots per inch) is a good enough image resolution for a photo on the web. Making your image resolution too large will make page loading slow, so you want to make this number small, but not too small. If you resize the resolution of your image, you will probably have to resize the image. One study suggested that the smallest web browser window today is 700 characters wide - that means you want to size your image so that it's easily viewable within the average browser window. Width is typically more of a concern than height, but in general, the longest side of your image should be no larger than 700 pixels at 96 dpi resolution.

If you try your hand at applying each one of these photo tips to your next eBay auction item, you may be surprised at the results. After all, you know what they say... a picture is worth a thousand words!