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Mercari · Checked 20 Aug 2026

Mercari photo size, and the plain background Mercari asks for

Square photos, 12 of them, on a background with nothing else in it. Mercari is unusually specific about the last part — its own advice asks for natural light and says plain backgrounds are best — so most of this page is about how to get one in an ordinary room.

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

Mercari photo specifications

Square · recommended

1200 × 12001:1

Mobile feed

Almost every view is a phone-sized card in a scrolling feed. Past roughly 1200px you are adding upload time, not clarity — framing matters far more than pixels.

Photos per listing
12
Maximum file size
Not published
Minimum pixels
Not published
Accepted formats
JPG, PNG

On these dimensions: Mercari does not publish this, so it is a conservative reading of secondary sources. We say so rather than implying precision we have not earned. The ratio is the part that matters on Mercari, and clearing the pixel figure above costs you nothing.

Resize your photos for Mercari

Already set to 1200 × 1200. 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

1200×1200 · 1:1 · up to 12 photos

Mercari's search results are a square grid.

Verified 20 Aug 2026Mercari Help — Creating a listing (12 photos)Full Mercari 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.

A plain background, without buying anything

Mercari asks for two things that reinforce each other: a background with no distractions in it, and natural light so the item's colour is the colour that arrives. Both are free. The options below are ordered by what they cost you, and the first one is good enough for the overwhelming majority of listings.

A white wall and a window

Free

Stand the item against the plainest wall you have, with the window to one side rather than behind you. This is the whole trick, and it beats every lamp in the house — daylight is the only light source most homes have that renders colour accurately.

A white sheet or duvet cover

Free

Ironed, pulled taut, laid flat for shoes and accessories or draped for garments. Creases read as shadows and shadows read as marks on the item, so the ironing is not optional. Photograph from directly above to keep the sheet out of the corners.

A2 or A1 white card

A few pounds

Curved from a table up against a wall it makes a seamless backdrop with no visible join, which is the single thing that makes a home photo look deliberate. It is also stiff enough not to crease, unlike the sheet.

Lift an almost-white backdrop

Software

When the sheet came out grey because the room was dim, the arithmetic can finish the job — a plain, connected, nearly-white background lifted to actual white without touching the item. It cannot invent a backdrop that was never plain, and it is not a substitute for the window.

When the sheet came out grey

A white sheet photographed in a dim room is not white in the file — it is somewhere around mid-grey, because your camera exposed for the item and the backdrop went with it. That is the one case software genuinely fixes: thebackground whitener lifts a plain, connected, nearly-white backdrop to actual white and blends the join, without cutting anything out or redrawing an edge.

What it cannot do is invent a plain background where there wasn't one. A patterned rug, a wood floor or a busy bedspread stops it dead, and it says so on the photo rather than quietly returning something wrong. It is a repair for a good photo taken in bad light, not a replacement for standing near a window.

The reason Mercari keeps mentioning natural light

Colour is the most common thing a resale buyer disputes, and household lighting is the most common cause. A tungsten bulb pushes everything orange, an older energy-saving bulb pushes it green, and your phone's automatic white balance then guesses at a correction from whatever is in the frame — which is why a navy jumper photographed on a white duvet under a lamp arrives looking black, or purple.

Daylight from a window has none of those problems and costs nothing. Shoot with the window to one side rather than behind you, turn the room lightsoff rather than adding them to the mix, and the colour that reaches the buyer is the colour of the item. Mixing daylight and a bulb is worse than either alone, because no single white balance can correct both.

This is also why editing your way to a nicer colour is a trap. The photograph that matches the item is the photograph that does not come back.

Spending 12 slots on a Mercari listing

Mercari asks you to shoot every side of the item, which for most things means four photos before you have shown a single detail. A workable division of twelve: four sides, two labels (brand and care), three details that justify the price, two of every flaw you can find, and one for scale. If you run out of flaws to photograph, that is a good listing — not a wasted slot.

Mercari rules and details worth knowing

Dimensions are the easy part. These are the things a listing actually gets penalised for, inMercari'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 ratioDerived
Mercari does not publish this, so it is a conservative reading of secondary sources. We say so rather than implying precision we have not earned.
Photo count, file size and floorsFirst-party
Read directly off Mercari'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 Mercari photos be?
1200 × 1200 pixels square. Mercari's search results are a square grid, so the ratio is the part that matters. Mercari publishes no pixel dimensions, which means that figure is our conservative reading of secondary sources rather than Mercari's own number — but 1200px square is ample for a square feed card and leaves room for a buyer to zoom.
Can Mercari listings have 12 photos or 20?
12. Mercari's own listing guide says "You can add up to 12 photos to your listing", confirmed across three separate help pages. The competing figure of 20 is repeated widely and is wrong, and it costs real work: photographs prepared for slots that do not exist are photographs thrown away at the point of listing.
What background does Mercari recommend?
In Mercari's words, "plain backgrounds are the best so there aren't any distractions", paired with advice to use natural lighting so the item's exact colour comes through. A white wall or an ironed white sheet in window light satisfies both. Nothing about that requires equipment — it requires standing in the right place relative to a window.
Does Mercari have a file size limit?
None that Mercari publishes, so this page does not quote one. Compressing to 1 to 2 MB per photo is still worth doing — twelve photos straight off a modern phone can be well over 60 MB, which is an upload people give up on halfway through rather than a limit they hit.
Do I have to photograph flaws on Mercari?
Mercari asks you to photograph and call out flaws explicitly, and to shoot every side of the item. It is also simply the right call commercially: a photographed scuff is a detail a buyer accepted before paying, and an unphotographed one is a refund request with your money already spent.
Should the first Mercari photo be styled or plain?
Plain, front-on, whole item, filling most of the square. Mercari's grid is dense and shoppers scan it fast, so the photo that wins is the one that is instantly legible at thumbnail size rather than the most attractive one. Save the styled shot for slot two, where it has a full screen to work on.
Are my photos uploaded when I use the resizer on this page?
No. Everything happens inside this browser tab on your own device — there is no server to upload to and no account to make. Open your browser's network inspector and run a batch through if you would rather confirm it than believe 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

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