September 24, 2026 · 8 min read

Photos That Sell: Better Listings on Vinted and eBay

A repeatable photo set that answers buyers' questions: what to shoot, in what order, how to light it, and how to keep files small enough to upload fast.

Two people list the same jacket at the same price. One sells in a day, the other sits for three weeks. Usually the difference isn't the price — it's that one listing answered every question a buyer had and the other made them guess. Photos do that work. Here's a set you can shoot in ten minutes and repeat for every item.

The shot list

Buyers scroll fast, then look for reasons to say no. Give them the reasons to say yes in order, and be openly honest about flaws — a photographed scuff costs you far less than a returned item and a bad review.

Light and background beat any camera

• Shoot next to a window in daylight, item facing the light, no flash. Overcast days are ideal.
• Avoid overhead room lights, which cast hard shadows and colour everything yellow.
• Use a plain background: a white wall, a bedsheet, a wooden floor, a sheet of card. Consistency across your listings makes your shop look deliberate.
• Steam or iron clothing and wipe down objects. Creases photograph worse than they look.
• Keep your shadow and your feet out of frame. Shoot straight on, not down at an angle.
• Hang clothes on a hanger or lay them flat and shoot from directly above.

Edit lightly, and never fake the item

Straighten, crop square, nudge the exposure so the item looks like it does in the room. That's it. Do not saturate the colour of a garment or smooth away a stain: the buyer receives the real object, and a colour that doesn't match is one of the most common reasons for returns. Snapseed and the built-in Photos editor are plenty.

Cutting out the background for the main shot

If you can't find a clean surface anywhere in your flat, remove the background from the first shot and drop the item onto plain white or a soft grey. It's the closest thing to a catalogue look you can get from a kitchen table, and it makes a grid of your listings look consistent.

• Use it for shot 1 only. Buyers want to see the other photos as they really are.
• Zoom in on the edges before you use it — straps, hair, lace and glass are where cutouts go wrong.
• Soft grey often looks better than pure white, which can make white items vanish.
• Check your marketplace's rules: some require the main image to be unedited or ban added text and borders.

Shrink the files before you upload

Modern phone photos are 4–8 MB each. Seven of those is a slow, failure-prone upload over mobile data, and every marketplace re-compresses your images anyway. Resizing to around 1,600 pixels on the long side and compressing gets you files of a few hundred kilobytes that look identical in the app and upload in seconds.

• Upload fails and "try again" loops on a phone are almost always oversized files or a weak connection.
• Smaller files also mean the platform's own compression has less work to do, so less mush.
• Do the compression after editing, not before, so you're not editing an already-degraded image.

What the photos can't do: the listing text

• Put the brand, item type, size and colour in the title — that's what people search.
• Give measurements. "Size M" means nothing across brands; chest, length and sleeve in centimetres do.
• State flaws in words as well as photos.
• Say why you're selling. "Bought the wrong size, worn once" reassures people.

A privacy note for sellers

Photos taken at home can carry GPS coordinates in their metadata, and a listing is public. Many marketplaces strip this on upload, but not all do, and screenshots you send in chat may not be processed the same way. Check the background of every shot too: post, parcels with your address on them, keys, documents, and reflections in glass or mirrors are easy to miss and impossible to take back.