Managing Your Photos

eBay Photo Basics – Part Four

By: Skip McGrath ©2009

Image management is the term used by eBay sellers for editing, storing, and uploading your photos.

Most digital cameras come with photo editing software. I happen to like Nikon’s the best. You can set it so whenever you plug your camera into the computer it automatically opens and you can import your photos with one click.

There are also a number of software programs you can buy to perform this function. If you own an Apple computer you are lucky because all Macs come with iPhoto which is one of the best all around photo editing and management programs on the market. There are some very advanced (and expensive) programs available such as Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is somewhat expensive, but there is a really good starter version called Photoshop Elements. If your digital camera doesn’t come with one, there are some good consumer-level programs available as well. If you go to www.shareware.com or www.tucows.com there are a number of free image and photo management programs you can download. A good one is PhotoPlus. The download is free, but they make their money selling the support and training tools which cost far less than most expensive programs and are excellent.

Whichever program you use, you want to be able to easily plug your camera into your computer, import the photos and then give them filenames so you can organize them, and edit and crop them. Most of the software programs have a feature which allows you to adjust brightness and contrast also just in case you didn’t get a great photo in the first place. This is a real time saver because you don’t have to re-shoot your product.

Once you have your photos edited and named, you will want to create a folder on your hard drive called eBay Photos (or something like that). Within this folder you will want sub-folders with the product categories you are selling. Simply file your photos to the appropriate folder so you can easily find them when you are ready to upload them to your auctions.

Once you have your photographs on your hard drive you now need to get them into your auctions. eBay offers two ways to manage your images. You can insert images from your computer’s hard drive one at a time as you launch auctions and eBay will charge you for each photo. The first photo is free and each additional photo costs $0.15. So, if you used four photos in a auction it would cost you $0.45 for every auction whether the item sold or not. This is obviously too expensive if you are running dozens of auctions a week.

Another way to host your photos is on a web site. If you already have a web site you can simply upload your photos to a web page and just insert the web URL of the specific photo into each auction. Unfortunately this is very time consuming and you have to pay for the web space. Some sellers use services like PhotoBucket –but again this is very time consuming.

You can also host your photos with an Auction Management Service. I use Vendio. Other popular services are Auctiva, InkFrog and ChannelAdvisor. All of these companies will host your images as part of their service. The money you save using eBay’s hosting service will easily pay for the cost of most auction management services. You not only get photo hosting but you get a lot of features to automate your auctions as well. In my opinion this is the best way to go if you are going to be launching at least 15 or more auctions a week.

The images are stored on the web site of the auction management service. When you create an auction, you get to the page to select the images you want to attach and simply double click or select a check mark next to the photo. The service inserts the URL of the particular image into your auction. When the auction launches, eBay just looks for those images at the named URL and they are displayed in your auction every time someone clicks on it. If you select a gallery image, that URL is fed constantly to eBay’s web site so it is always visible when members are searching, browsing or perusing the gallery.

Once you start using an auction management service you will appreciate both the speed, and therefore timesaving aspects of hosting your photos this way, but you will get the whole host of additional services such as templates, automated customer emails, shipping calculators, and inventory management tools that come with the service –usually for what you would be paying eBay to host photos individually.