Gallery Images on eBay Should Be SQUARE!

I have talked about this a lot in my product photography guides as well as more recently in Don’t Mess Up Your Product Images blog post. But I think it needs to be repeated as I review eBay listings every week that are repeating that same old mistake of NOT making their gallery images square! So I think it’s time to feature this problem once more, so that everyone gets it right.

You may be wondering why it’s so important to have square gallery images in the first place?

I will show you why!

Take a look at this search result:

As you can see, that one listing in the middle takes less than 50% of the SPACE available compared to other listings that use square gallery images! And I hope I don’t have to tell you that larger images will attract more views, clicks and sales as a result.

And this is exactly why you should always, ALWAYS have square gallery images for your eBay listings! eBay won’t take care of image editing for you, so you can’t just upload whatever images you have and hope for the best!

Even if image editing is not your thing and such technical stuff scares you off, you really should learn at least the basics behind preparing images for eBay use, following my image editing guide here. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you want the same size (number of pixels) for both the width and height of your image, to make it square.

The easiest way to do this is by simply using the CROP tool in an image editing program of your choice (Photoshop, online editors etc.). So what you do is simply enter the width and height within the crop tool settings, so they’re the same, and then select all of the image or part of it to make it square. That’s all there is to it really!

If the item you sell is tall (like a selfie stick or scope for a rifle), rotate it so it takes up most of the space in your image, like this:

If you sell multiple colours of the same item, you can (and should) create a gallery image that features all colours in your listing, like this:

Either way you’ll end up with a square, fully filled image that takes up as much space in search results as possible.

Lastly, eBay recommends that gallery images are 1600 x 1600 pixels large. If you take your own images, you won’t have any problems with this as images from your camera will be larger than that. But if you don’t have access to high resolution images (for example when your supplier sends you images to use on eBay), DON’T make it 1600 x 1600 pixels large as the quality of the image will suffer greatly in this case.

What you want to do is still keep the square aspect ratio but instead of 1600 x 1600 pixels, use smaller numbers. 1000 x 1000 pixels is still a very large image for eBay use and even 800 x 800 can be used. Whatever size you use, the width and height should be the same!

If you have any questions on how to get this done properly, please leave them below this post and I will personally help you out!

Thanks,
Andrew