Is My Photo Good Enough for a Listing?

Every marketplace publishes its photo rules. eBay wants 500 pixels minimum. Etsy wants 2000. Vinted wants 800×600. You can find all of that in a few minutes.

What none of them tell you is the thing that actually costs you the sale: whether the photo is any good. A 4000-pixel photo of a jacket shot in a dark hallway passes every technical requirement on every platform, and still looks like something you’d scroll past.

This page has both. The requirements, because you came here for them, and a free check of the photo itself, which is the part nothing else does.

The requirements, by platform

Platform	Minimum	Recommended	Max photos
eBay	500 px longest side	1600 px (enables zoom)	24
Vinted	800 × 600 px	1080 × 1350 (4:5)	20
Etsy	—	2000 px shortest side, 2000 × 2500	10
Facebook Marketplace	500 × 500 px	1200 px longest side	10

A few rules worth knowing beyond the pixel counts:

• eBay rejects borders, added text, watermarks and logos on the main image. A frame you added to “make it pop” can get the listing pulled.
• Facebook Marketplace only accepts JPEG and PNG. Etsy and eBay also take GIF.
• eBay’s own data says listings with 8 or more photos convert about 30% better. The cheapest improvement to most listings is more angles, not a better camera.
• Any phone from the last decade clears every minimum here comfortably. Resolution is almost never the actual problem.

Which is the point. If you’ve got this far and your photo is 3000 pixels wide, you’ve satisfied the rules and learned nothing about whether it will sell.

The part the rules don’t cover

Look at what buyers actually complain about, and it’s never resolution:

• The item is too dark to see, because it was shot indoors without a window.
• The whites are blown out by a flash, so the fabric has no texture.
• The colours are off. A warm bulb turns a grey coat beige, and the buyer opens the parcel to something that doesn’t match the photo.
• The photo is soft or blurry, because a phone in low light uses a slow shutter.
• The frame is busy at the edges, a laundry basket and a radiator competing with the thing you’re selling.

Every one of those is fixable in seconds, and every one of them is invisible to you, because you were there when you took it and your brain fills in what the camera missed.

”My photos looked fine until I uploaded them”

This is the single most common complaint in seller forums, and it usually isn’t your photo. Marketplaces re-encode every image on upload. Sellers report scans made at 600 dpi coming back at 96, and photos uploaded through a marketplace’s phone app arriving visibly worse than the same file uploaded from a desktop.

Three things follow, and they’re worth more than any amount of editing:

• Upload from a computer where you can. Several platforms’ mobile apps downsize more aggressively than their web uploader does.
• Upload the original, not a copy that’s been round-tripped. A photo that has been through WhatsApp or a group chat has already been compressed once. Each pass throws away more.
• Start cleaner than you think you need to. Compression attacks noise and fine detail first. A slightly grainy photo doesn’t stay slightly grainy: it comes out mushy. A clean photo has more to lose before anyone notices.

That last one is where a check actually helps. You cannot control what the platform does to your file, but you can hand it something that survives the trip.

Check your photo

Drop a photo in and you get a verdict in about ten seconds: whether it’s ready to list, and if not, what’s wrong, in plain words. Everything runs inside your browser. The photo is never uploaded, there’s no account, and nothing is stored.

What the check looks at. It grades the photograph itself: exposure (too dark, too bright), white balance and saturation (colours off, colours too intense), sharpness and noise (too blurry, too noisy), and the frame (busy edges, unclear subject). Those nine faults are the ones that make an item hard to see, and they are what “not ready” means when you see it.

What it does not look at. It does not check the file against a specific platform’s rules: not the pixel minimums in the table above, not file size, not formats, and not whether you’ve added a border eBay will object to. It has no opinion on your background, your styling, or your price. Use the table for the rules; use the check for the photo.

That distinction is deliberate. Plenty of tools will tell you a file’s dimensions, DPI and compression. Almost none will tell you the photo is too dark to sell.

Fixing what it finds

If the check flags something, Fix Everything corrects the common cases in one click — exposure, contrast, white balance and colour. It’s conservative on purpose: it will decline to touch a photo it can’t confidently improve rather than push it and make things worse. When it declines, it says so and why.

Three things it won’t do, so you know where the line is: it doesn’t retouch or edit content, it doesn’t invent detail that motion blur destroyed, and it won’t make a badly framed photo well framed. For those, the fastest fix is not software:

• Too dark → move next to a window, turn the overhead light off, shoot again.
• Colours off → daylight is free and neutral; indoor bulbs are not.
• Blurry → brace your elbows, or put the phone down on something.
• Busy edges → a bedsheet behind the item, or just step closer.

Reshooting takes ninety seconds and beats any amount of processing. The check is most useful for telling you whether it’s worth doing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this check my photo against eBay’s rules? No. It grades the photograph — exposure, colour, sharpness, framing — not the file against a platform’s spec. The requirements table above covers the rules; almost every modern phone photo clears them anyway.

Is my photo uploaded anywhere? No. The analysis and the fix both run in your browser using your device’s own graphics hardware. Nothing is sent to a server, there’s no account, and nothing is kept after you close the tab.

Is it really free? What’s the catch? It’s free, there’s no signup, no watermark on what you download, and no limit on how many photos you check. It’s a tool built to prove a scoring engine works, and the site exists to demonstrate it.

It says my photo is fine but it still looks bad to me. Then trust yourself. The check measures technical faults: light, colour, sharpness, framing. It has no opinion on whether the item is styled well, shot from a flattering angle, or appealing. A technically perfect photo of a crumpled jumper on a duvet is still a bad listing photo.

How many photos should I list? More than you think. eBay’s own figures put listings with eight or more images at roughly 30% better conversion. Different angles, any flaws shown honestly, and one clean shot of the whole item.

Will it work on my phone? Yes. It runs in a mobile browser with no app to install, which is usually where listing photos live anyway.