Bypass eBay's photo restrictions by hosting auction photos on your own server.
Any photos that appear in your auctions must be stored on a web server somewhere; which one you use is up to you. When you use eBay's Picture Services, you're instructing eBay to store your photos on their own dedicated picture server and link them to your listing automatically. While this is the easiest and most convenient way to host photos, it's also fraught with limitations.
Hosting photos off-eBay has tons of advantages over using eBay's Picture Services (ePS). For instance, you can have:
Include photos of any size with no "supersize" fees. With ePS, photos are limited to 400x300 pixels, or 800x600 for an additional fee [Hack #46] .
Large photos are more striking and show much more detail than small ones, and will end up getting you more bids. The problem with eBay's supersize photos is that they appear only when bidders click the Supersize Picture links beneath the thumbnails. If you host your own photos, you can put the large versions right in the auction (as many as you like), so your bidders don't have to click to see them. This is especially helpful if you choose to create a photo collage [Hack #81] .
Control the quality (compression) settings of your JPG photos. ePS has a tendency to over-compress photos, which reduces detail and increases fuzziness.
Use very long or very wide images that don't conform to the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. These would otherwise be shrunk beyond recognition to conform to eBay's 400x300 size limit.
Place your photos directly in the text of your auction descriptions or use a more creative photo presentation, such as thumbnails [Hack #77] , a custom photo album [Hack #79] , or even a rotating 360° view of your item [Hack #80] .
Make changes [Hack #65] to photos while an auction is running, even after it has received bids. You'll also have control over how long the images remain in your auctions after they've closed.
Reuse the same photos for multiple auctions without having to upload them repeatedly.
In most cases, an FTP program is required to transfer your images from your computer to your web server. (The exception is when you're using a dedicated picture hosting service that requires you to upload photos through a web page.)
Although nearly every modern computer comes with a command-line FTP client, you'll probably want something a little friendlier and more streamlined. Popular FTP programs include Fetch for the Mac (fetchsoftworks.com) and WS_FTP for Windows (ipswitch.com). All you'll need is the host name (the name or address of the server), your username and password, and the full path of the public folder in which to store the files.
Users of most modern versions of Windows (Me, 2000, and XP) can also access FTP servers right from Explorer by typing this URL into Explorer's address bar:
ftp://
my_server.com |
where my_server.com is the host name
or IP address of your FTP server. If you want Explorer to log you in
automatically, include your username and password in the URL, like
this:
ftp://
username:password@my_server.com |
The FTP server then acts like any ordinary folder, where files can be dragdropped, deleted, renamed, or moved into subfolders.
When hosting your own photos, be sure to choose appropriate filenames for your image files; otherwise they may not work as expected. Make sure the filenames are all lowercase and have no spaces whatsoever. Avoid special characters, such as #, @, and %. Also, the images should use the JPG format [Hack #73] , except for logos and animated images, which work best as GIFs.
If you sell a lot of the same stuff repeatedly on eBay, you'll probably want to leave your images on the server for the long haul. To make image management easier down the road, try to be consistent when naming your files. For instance, say you sell bonsai trees and pruning tools. The filenames of your tree photos might be tree_apple.jpg, tree_juniper.jpg, and tree_elm.jpg, while your photos of tools might be named tool_shears.jpg and tool_stakes.jpg.
The most direct way to include a photo in one of your auctions is eBay's Sell Your Item form [Hack #43] . On the Pictures & Details page, click the "Your own Web hosting" tab, and in the "Picture Web address" field, specify the full URL of your photo, like this:
http://my_server.com/my_folder/image.jpg |
where image.jpg is the filename of the photo, my_folder is the public name of the folder in which the image file is stored, and my_server.comis the host name. No HTML is required to specify your photos this way, which makes it especially convenient; your images will simply appear beneath your auction description.
Warning
Avoid the Picture Show option [Hack #46] , which presents multiple self-hosted photos in a slide-show format. Although it allows you to specify more than one self-hosted photo, it circumvents some of the advantages of hosting the photos yourself, such as being able to show multiple full-size photos side-by-side. Another drawback—depending on your perspective—is that eBay opens a new window when a bidder clicks the preview photo at the top of the page, which means new bidders may never see your payment and shipping terms [Hack #54] .
If you want to include multiple photos in this space, one of the best ways is to consolidate them into a photo collage [Hack #81] , and then specify the URL of the collage in the "Picture Web address" field.
If you have more than one photo or if you prefer to place
your photos directly in your auction text, use the
<img> HTML tag [Hack
#52] to reference them, like this:
<img src="http://my_server.com/my_folder/image.jpg">
You can include as many pictures as you like with the <img> tag, but it's up to you to
present them in an attractive and efficient manner using the <img> tag's alignment and
text-wrapping parameters
[Hack #52] . Figure 5-10 shows some photos
placed right in the text, one right-aligned and one
left-aligned.
Figure 5-10. A self-hosted photo appears beneath the auction description unless you insert it directly into the description text with HTML
Ordinary inline images are only the beginning; if you want to have a little fun with the presentation of your self-hosted photos, you can make clickable thumbnails [Hack #77] , construct an interactive photo album [Hack #79] , and show a 360-degree view of your item [Hack #80] .
The preview photo is the small picture that normally appears at the top of your listing, as shown in Figure 4-11 [Hack #54] , and is one of the first things your customers see when they view the page. The preview photo is linked so that bidders can click it to jump to the full-size version shown beneath your description. If you like, you can redirect this link [Hack #54] , which will help ensure your bidders read your description and see your shipping terms.
When you specify the URL of a self-hosted photo in the aforementioned "Picture Web address" field, eBay uses it for the preview photo. (Or, if you're using eBay Picture Services, eBay uses your first photo.)
For this reason, avoid leaving the "Picture Web address" field blank, which you may be tempted to do if you want all your photos to appear inside the listing text. Instead, there's no reason you can't put photos both in the description and in the "Picture Web address" field. If you do decide to put your photos exclusively in the description text, make sure to check the box that says, "The description already contains a picture URL for my item," when constructing your listing [Hack #43] . This ensures that the little green "picture" icon appears next to your listing in search results and category listings, unless, of course, you specify a Gallery photo [Hack #82] , which appears in this space regardless.