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SellerPhotoKit

eBay · Checked 20 Aug 2026

eBay photo size: the numbers, and the two everyone gets wrong

eBay publishes more about photographs than any of the other five marketplaces — a recommended size, a hard floor, an upload cap and a policy on what may appear in the frame. Two of those figures are widely misquoted, so every number here is cited to eBay's own help pages.

Your photos are processed on your own device and are never uploaded to a server.

eBay photo specifications

Recommended · recommended

1600 × 16001:1

Desktop detail

Plenty of browsing happens on a desktop, where buyers enlarge photos. The platform publishes a specific pixel target above feed size — clear it.

Photos per listing
24
Maximum file size
7 MB per photo
Minimum pixels
500 px
Accepted formats
JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, WEBP, HEIC, AVIF

2 sizes worth having

  • 1600 × 16001:1

    Recommended. 1600px on the longest side is eBay's own recommendation. Fit mode pads rather than crops, so nothing gets clipped.

  • 2000 × 20001:1

    Large square. More headroom for detail shots of texture, labels and flaws.

Resize your photos for eBay

Already set to 1600 × 1600. Drop in as many photos as you like — they are processed on your own device, so nothing is uploaded and there is no queue.

Marketplace
Size
How to reach that shape

1600×1600 · 1:1 · up to 24 photos · under 7 MB each

1600px on the longest side is eBay's own recommendation. Fit mode pads rather than crops, so nothing gets clipped.

Verified 20 Aug 2026eBay Help — Adding pictures to your listingsFull eBay photo guide

Drop your listing photos here

Add as many as you like. Pick the marketplace, adjust any crop that needs it, and download them all as one ZIP.

iPhone HEIC works
Dropped straight from the camera roll. Converted to JPEG on the way out.
Nothing is uploaded
Every photo is processed inside this browser tab. No server ever sees it.
Drop anywhere
The whole page accepts photos — no need to aim for a small box.

1600 px and 7 MB is a generous pairing

A recommended size and a file size cap only mean something read together, because between them they decide how hard the encoder has to work. eBay asks for a 1600 × 1600 photo and allows 7 MB for it, which works out at roughly 2.7 MB per megapixel — several times what a full-quality export of a photograph normally needs.

eBay

2.7 MB

per megapixel

7 MB across 2.6 MP. You will not hit this cap with a photograph unless something has gone wrong.

Etsy, for contrast

250 KB

per megapixel

1 MB across 4.0 MP. The same job, an order of magnitude tighter — which is what a real constraint looks like.

So on eBay the number to think about is the pixel one. A 12-megapixel phone photo resized to 1600px on its longest side discards about 79% of its pixels — all of them pixels no eBay page was ever going to display — and that alone usually brings the file comfortably under 7 MB without any aggressive compression at all.

The order matters: resize first, compress second, and only if you still need to. Squeezing a 48-megapixel photo into a few megabytes spends the whole byte budget describing four times more pixels than anyone will see.

The floor is the number that actually rejects listings

500 pixels on the longest side is written into eBay's picture policy, and below it the listing does not go up. Nothing off a modern camera comes close to that — but a screenshot, an image saved from a web page, or a photo someone sent you over a messaging app that compressed it can all land under 500px. There is no fix once it has happened: a small image enlarged is still a small image, with the softness now spread over more pixels.

What eBay's picture policy will not allow in the frame

eBay is stricter here than any of the other five, and the rules are not about quality — they are about the photo being a photograph of the item and nothing else. Each of these is prohibited outright rather than discouraged.

24 slots is enough to stop editing anything

Most of the temptation to add text or arrows to an eBay photo comes from trying to make one image carry three jobs. With 24 slots you do not have to: give the flaw its own photograph, close and well lit, and describe it in words underneath. That is both inside the policy and better evidence if the sale is ever disputed — an annotated photo proves what you drew on it, and a plain one proves what the item looked like.

eBay rules and details worth knowing

Dimensions are the easy part. These are the things a listing actually gets penalised for, ineBay's own words wherever it has published them.

Where these numbers came from

Guides on this topic contradict each other, and several of the most-copied figures are simply wrong. So every claim here carries its provenance, split in two — because the pixel guidance and the hard limits genuinely do not come from the same quality of source.

Dimensions and ratioFirst-party
Read directly off eBay's own pages, listed below, on 20 Aug 2026.
Photo count, file size and floorsFirst-party
Read directly off eBay's own pages, listed below, on 20 Aug 2026.

Pages we checked on 20 Aug 2026

Where two credible sources disagree on a limit, we take the lower number: preparing 12 photos for a marketplace that accepts 20 costs you nothing, and preparing 20 for one that accepts 12 wastes work at the point of listing.

Common questions

What size should eBay photos be?
1600 pixels on the longest side. eBay's exact wording is "To optimize for mobile, make your pictures 1600 pixels on the longest side." You will see it claimed that 1600px is the threshold that unlocks desktop zoom — that is not what eBay's help centre says, so we quote eBay instead. 2000px is a reasonable choice for detail shots of texture, labels and flaws, and costs you nothing given the upload cap.
Is eBay's photo size limit 7 MB or 12 MB?
7 MB for a photo you upload. The 12 MB figure is real but applies only when eBay pulls the image from a web address, and repeating it as the upload limit is the most common factual error in eBay photo guides. At eBay's own recommended dimensions 7 MB is not a constraint on ordinary photographs — it is a guard against someone uploading a RAW file.
What is the minimum photo size on eBay?
500 pixels on the longest side, and this one is a hard floor written into eBay's picture policy rather than a recommendation. Below it a listing is rejected outright. It matters most for screenshots and images saved from a website, which are the two things most likely to arrive under 500px.
How many photos can an eBay listing have?
24, the most generous allowance of the six marketplaces on this site. eBay buyers examine listings closely and the format rewards it, so this is the one place where filling every slot is genuinely worth the time.
Can I put my username or a watermark on my eBay photos?
No. eBay's picture policy prohibits watermarks of any type, explicitly including ownership attributions, alongside added borders, added text, artwork and marketing material. The exception people reach for — "but mine is only to stop photo theft" — is not one eBay makes.
Does eBay allow white padding around a photo to make it square?
Padding to reach a ratio is not the same thing as an added border, and it is what any resizer does in fit mode: your photo is scaled to fit inside the frame and the gap is filled with plain white. What the policy prohibits is a decorative frame, a coloured edge, or graphics and text laid on top. Keep the padding plain and there is nothing to declare.
Should I use fill or fit for eBay photos?
Fit, which is why it is the default on this page's presets. Fill crops to cover the frame, and on eBay the photo most likely to be cropped badly is the one that matters most — a full-length item, a boxed set, a label photographed corner to corner. Fit guarantees nothing is clipped, at the cost of plain white either side.
Are my photos uploaded to a server when I resize them here?
No. Every crop and re-encode happens inside this browser tab, on your own device, with no account and no upload. You can verify it with your browser's network inspector open — which is a claim worth checking on any site that makes it.

Photo sizes for the other marketplaces

Cross-listing the same item? The resizer can produce every one of these sizes from the same photos in a single pass — pick a preset, download, switch preset, download again.

More free photo tools

All of them run on your own device, all of them are free, and none of them ask who you are.