Create a Good Gallery Photo
Prepare your gallery photos to use the postage stamp–sized area to its fullest potential.
The Gallery upgrade [Hack #46] displays a small thumbnail photo next to your item in search results and category listings. All that’s required (aside from the small fee) is that you provide eBay with an image to use.
When your listing goes live, eBay automatically processes the photo by performing the following tasks:
- Converted
The image file is converted to the JPG file format.
- Resized
The photo is resized so that the larger dimension is 80 pixels.
- Hosted
The image file is hosted on eBay’s server, making it accessible at:
http://thumbs.ebaystatic.com/pict/31354034868080_0.jpg.jpg where
3135403486is the item number of the corresponding listing. (This URL comes in handy, for instance, if you want to hack the Search Robot [Hack #21] to email you photos of the listings it finds.)
Tip
The closer your photo is to eBay’s current final size of 80X80, the less of a hatchet job eBay’s servers will have to do, and the better your gallery photo will look. From time to time, however, eBay changes the size of gallery photos. Fortunately, it’s easy to get the current size by performing an ordinary a search on eBay. Then, right-click one of the gallery images in the search results, and select View Image (in Mozilla/Firefox) or Properties (in Internet Explorer).
The best auction photo [Hack #70] will not necessarily be the best gallery photo, so you’ll most likely want to prepare two ...
Get eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
