Suggestions For Better eBay Gallery Picture Appearance and Effectiveness

eBay is a search driven shopping environment. Shoppers type in what they are looking for and eBay presents a list of items that match the search criteria. The content of your item title primarily determines whether or not your particular items for sale will appear in any given search result. Price, location, shipping cost, and ending date/time also bear a role.

When you elect to pay eBay 35 cents for eBay's "Gallery Picture" feature, eBay will display a thumbnail sized version of your item picture in search results. That thumbnail combined with the other information presented to shoppers in search resutls constitutes your "advertising" on eBay so is very important -- more important, in fact, for exposing your items to shoppers than what you put into your item descriptions.

			Again, to keep this all in perspective, first your item needs to appear in search results when shoppers are searching for items such as you are selling. Then the shopper needs to choose within those search results to visit your particular item listing. A well designed great looking gallery picture should help you get that click. Easier said than done. Many photos don't reduce well to eBay gallery sized versions no matter how one prepares them and, unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot that can be done about that. However, even small improvements would seem especially important in this area so I've spent some time experimenting and am sharing with you what I've discovered along the way...
A		THIS IS AN ORIGINAL PHOTO WITH NO EDITING NOTICE THAT THE SUBJECT OF THE PHOTO IS SMALLER THAN THOSE BELOW
B		CROPPED TO SQUARE FOR DETAIL, ROTATED FOR INTEREST, BACKGROUND REMOVED, TEXT ADDED NOTICE THAT MORE ITEM DETAIL IS VISIBLE
C		CROPPED SLIGHTLY, CANVAS EXPANDED TO SQUARE, TEXT ADDED USING EXTRA SPACE AVAILABLE TO SEND AN ADVERTISING MESSAGE
D		CROPPED SLIGHTLY, CANVAS EXPANDED TO SQUARE, BLACK FILLED USING EXTRA SPACE AVAILABLE TO EFFECTIVELY FRAME THE SUBJECT

To Begin With: Set your camera to produce only 1 to 2 megapixels photos

Yes, that's right -- both for photos you plan to give to eBay for processing and for those you will be self hosting it's usually best to set your camera to produce pictures in the range of 1 to 2 megapixels. For reference, 1.3 megapixels (SXGA) produces a 1280x1024 image, 1.9 megapixels (UXGA) produces a 1600x1200 pixel image.

• Higher megapixel settings don't produce higher quality for viewing on computer screens

  Most digital cameras are primarily designed to produce prints. If you want to be able to produce a 16" x 20" print then it's probably best to shoot at 8 megapixels, for 8" by 10" prints at 5 megapixels, etc. But, that's primarily all a higher megapixel setting is good for. All other things being equal the true quality (sharpness and color rendition) at any given size will be the same regardless of the megapixel setting you choose.
  
  So, even though your camera's megapixel settings may be stated in terms of "quality" you will not end up with lower quality when the pictures you are taking will be displayed only on computer screens.
  
  

• 1 to 2 megapixel photos will already be the right size to give to eBay

  Whether or not you decide to perform any cropping the result will already be in the optimum range for use as an eBay Gallery Picture (640 to 1600 on its longest side). No reduction in width or height will be necessary -- thus eliminating any possibility of quality degradation as a result of reducing to get your photos into the optimum size range.
  
  

• 1 to 2 megapixel photos will be closer to the size you want to display them with self hosting

  Typically you'll want to display photos in the range of 420 to 750 pixels wide within your item listings. The further the original size you reduce from to get to that range of size, the greater the potential for an overall degradation of quality as a result of the process of reducing.
  
  

Save yourself a lot trouble by turning down the megapixel "quality" setting:  Be able to shoot more photos in a session, take up less storage space on your computer, and experience much faster uploading times. All without any effect on true quality and potentially an actual improvement in quality when the photos will only be used for selling on eBay.

Self hosting or eBay hosting - for Gallery Pictures there's not much difference

As a part of improving sales potential you may have already set yourself up with your own web hosting to gain control over the quality, size, and number of the photos displayed in your selling pages. eBay Gallery Pictures, however, are always ultimately hosted by eBay. During the process of creating a listing whether having chosen self hosting, basic eBay hosting, or enhanced eBay hosting, you are required to hand over one picture to eBay and eBay processes it to produce an 80 pixel wide/high thumbnail and a 96 pixel wide/high thumbnail. The smaller version is displayed in search results shown as a "List" and the larger when shown as a "Gallery".

For convenience I suggest using eBay hosting for the one picture they will host for free. That picture will then automatically be used to produce the gallery versions as well as the versions eBay displays in the selling page header and below the item description. Fortunately, the same preparations that tend to result in better appearing gallery versions also tend to produce excellent versions of the size eBay prepares and presents in the selling page - 200 pixels in the header and 400 pixels below the item description. I'll be showing examples of that processing.

The alternative is to upload an image you've prepared to your own web hosting location then, during the process of creating an item listing, provide eBay with the URL for that image. Nothing wrong with that, but there's little difference in the gallery picture quality that results - just more work required on your part. eBay still processes the image to produce their own versions of the gallery pictures.

So you are not confused, even if you are wisely displaying self hosted pictures in the body of your item descriptions you may still choose eBay Hosting during the process of creating a listing, pick one picture from your computer, and it will be hosted for free by eBay. The photos in the body of your item descriptions will still be there.

For eBay Hosting do not reduce the size of your images

If you have practical experience working with photos you might presume it best to hand over to eBay images already at or close to the size they will be adjusted to. Then, at least, you'd have control over the method by which the image is reduced. Unfortunately, that's counter productive. eBay advises for best Gallery Picture results that an image be at least 640 pixels on the longest side and my tests seem to confirm that. Providing perfect 80x80, 96x96, or 200x200 images to eBay actually each result in worse appearing thumbnails than from 640x640 and larger images.

My tests do not go so far as to indicate an upper limit to the size you should provide but eBay recommends in general that images they process be given to them in the range of 1000 to 1600 pixels on the longer side. Probably that 1600 pixel upper recommended size applies to Gallery Pictures also.

Surprisingly, it is OK to apply compression!

eBay's Basic uploader will accept file sizes up to 4 megabytes (4,096 KB) but even with a good broadband Internet connection it can take quite a while to upload them. Thankfully, it appears to do no visual damage to supply eBay with JPG format images with compression added to reduce their file sizes to something more manageable. Basically, the larger your photo is in pixels, the more compression you can add. To play it safe add compression so the resulting file size lands in the range of 100 to 300 KB.

Before Sending to eBay, Crop to Increase the Resulting Size of the Subject Matter

Notice that the clock in the example to the left appears smaller than the one to the right. If you do nothing else at least crop the photo you plan to give to eBay as closely as you possibly can to the edges of the item itself. With virtually all photo and graphic editors cropping consists of "drawing" a rectangle around what you want to keep (your selection) then choosing in the menus to crop to that selection. With some editors you may need to specify that the "canvas" size is reduced to match, or in other words, you may need to specify that you want to discard the portions of the image you've removed, not just blank them out.

For Maximum Size, Crop to Square Before Sending to eBay

If you want or need to either show more detail and/or present a more interesting representation of your item abandon the notion that you must show the entire item. Let's say you're selling an adjustable wrench. Well, shoppers almost certainly won't be interested in the handle so show them what they are really interested in, the business end or perhaps just show the trademark logo. You could also try something like I did with the lower image to the right -- only show a representative sample of the item.

Whatever portion of the item you decide to show it is best if you can fit it into a perfect square. To accomplish that with virtually all photo and graphic editors first draw a square (create a selection) as best you can visually around the part you wish to retain. Then find a way to adjust the selection size so the width and height of the selection are equal. It may be necessary to move that selection slightly to get your subject centered, then perform your crop.

The importance of cropping to square is that the resulting Gallery Picture becomes 25% larger than a normal rectangular photo. The two samples above demonstrate the difference quite dramatically.

Use Extra Space Resulting from Crop to Square Before Sending to eBay

Remember, your Gallery Pictures are important advertising. You are free to use them however you can to help entice shoppers to visit your listing instead of others. For example, eBay search results are devoid of information that distinguishes one seller from another in terms of reputation and reliability. In my example to the right I'm sending the message that I've been trading on eBay for a long time and am proud of it which indicates, in turn, that I'm probably a safe person to buy from.

Adding text to images in a manner that will survive eBay processing into Gallery Pictures isn't easy. I used what is probably the most legible font, Verdana, and needed to apply it in an extremely large size in proportion to the rest of the image. If you haven't the time or inclination to experiment then you may instead try to attract attention to your Gallery photos by filling in empty space with a solid color as I did with the image to the left. First crop your image then resize the canvas to square in a manner that centers the subject and then fill in a color. I've seen this technique used with paintings to help give them a better contrast to the stark white background of eBay search result pages.

Test Results, Discussion, and Notes:

I did a lot more testing than what is represented in the charts below but they pretty much tell the whole story:

File Size and Type	Self Hosted (Provided as URL)		Uploaded to eBay Directly
	80x80 eBay Result	96x96 eBay Result	80x80 eBay Result	96x96 eBay Result
80x80 BMP 19 KB	3,592 Bytes	3,592 Bytes	Assuming one will only be sending one picture to eBay for (free) hosting by them, it wouldn't be wise for it to be 80x80 or 96x96 because then that size would also appear as the header and footer picture in the listing page itself. That's why I didn't bother uploading images to eBay smaller than 200x200. Turns out these smaller sizes aren't so good for self hosting either because the only size that comes out well in both 80x80 (List) and 96x96 (Gallery) appearance are the one's given to eBay as 80x80. Using that size, however, sacrifices the quality and size that is available for the 96x96 result when providing eBay with larger images (as you will see below).
80x80 JPG 4 KB	3,525 Bytes	3,525 Bytes
96x96 BMP 28 KB	3,409 Bytes	4,687 Bytes
96x96 JPG 4 KB	3,376 Bytes	4,532 Bytes

I'll save you some trouble studying the differences below. The self hosted results are only very slightly better probably as a result of the additional processing eBay does to add their logo. Other than the logo they are perceptually the same without the aid of the mouseover magnified view I've added.

Providing eBay with larger images seems to be better than smaller ones especially if you have added text to them. Clearer text resulted when I provided eBay with a 640x640 version than with a 200x200 version. And clearer still when I provided a 780x780 version. Notice also that there is no apparent difference between the results when I provided the 780x780 in uncompressed BMP format vs. when I provided in JPG format with compression.

File Size and Type	Self Hosted (Provided as URL) 80x80 eBay Result	eBay Hosted (Uploaded Directly) 80x80 eBay Result	Self Hosted (Provided as URL) 96x96 eBay Result	eBay Hosted (Uploaded Directly) 96x96 eBay Result
200x200 BMP 117.24 KB	3,505 Bytes	3,493 Bytes	4,302 Bytes	4,302 Bytes
640x640 BMP 1.17 MB (1201 KB)	3,302 Bytes	3,370 Bytes	4,248 Bytes	4,210 Bytes
780x780 BMP 1.74 MB (1783 KB)	3,304 Bytes	3,362 Bytes	4,159 Bytes	4,135 Bytes
780x780 JPG 57.25 KB	3,302 Bytes	3,346 Bytes	4,145 Bytes	4,115 Bytes
File Size and Type	Self Hosted (Provided as URL) 80x80 eBay Result	eBay Hosted (Uploaded Directly) 80x80 eBay Result	Self Hosted (Provided as URL) 96x96 eBay Result	eBay Hosted (Uploaded Directly) 96x96 eBay Result

I mentioned the convenience of using eBay hosting for their one free picture. Here is a comparison of the resulting header picture sized by eBay to 200x200 and the one that appears under the description sized by eBay to 400x400:

As you can see eBay does a much better job with the 200x200 and 400x400 sizes than they do with the gallery sizes. To see how much better eBay could also be doing with gallery pictures, below are the results of resizing to 80x80 and 96x96 using Irfanview. The difference is primarily noticable as better retention of text character edge rounding. Overall the quality is better than eBay produces even though these I created using Irfanview have smaller file sizes:

Original:	200x200 BMP 117.24 KB	640x640 BMP 1.17 MB (1201 KB)	780x780 BMP 1.74 MB (1783 KB)	780x780 JPG 57.25 KB
Resized to 80x80 using Irfanview:	2,745 Bytes	2,719 Bytes	2,707 Bytes	2,700 Bytes
Resized to 96x96 using Irfanview:	3,507 Bytes	3,527 Bytes	3,473 Bytes	3,468 Bytes

GIF Format 15,499 Bytes

Knowing it's possible to create better thumbnails than eBay does might prompt you to create your own rather than re-using eBay's such as to present your own galleries of other items for sale. You wouldn't want, however, to go about it the same way as I did above if you are adding text. Instead, add the text after you have already resized the image. Naturally, when creating your own thumbnails you may also show them larger which goes a long way toward making them more attractive. The images to the left and right are 150x150 pixels. When creating your own thumbnails you also have the option to save them in GIF format which generally produces a clearer result but carries a higher cost in bytes. The JPG format, on the other hand, along with enabling smaller file sizes (faster loading), produces a closer color match to the original.

JPG Format 9,851 Bytes

More Notes:

I originally wanted to and could have used only Irfanview to perform the pre-processing of these images because it is free software available to everyone using the Windows Operating System. I found it quite cumbersome, however, using Irfanview to add text so I used Paint Shop Pro Version 9 for the text enabling me to better adjust text size and position "on the fly". Although I didn't use it here (eBay did all the compressing) another great feature available with Paint Shop Pro Version 9 is the ability to preview the results of various levels of compression prior to saving. With Irfanview the best one can do is save various versions then afterwards compare the results.

Irfanview is free software available for download at http://www.irfanview.com. There are tutorials using Irfanview to prepare photos for eBay here: EAPH Tutorials Page

Paint Shop Pro version 9 isn't free but is now several years old so can be purchased inexpensively on eBay. I have not tried the newer versions of Paint Shop Pro so can not say if they are better.

A special thank you to John for providing the original photo I used for the testing. Visit John's Castlewigg Lodge Country House in Scottland. Note: The text I added to the photo is not accurate, done only to serve as an example of features that could be added to a photo.