What to show
Photographs do more work than descriptions. A buyer deciding whether to bid is looking rather than reading, and a specialist assessing something remotely is working almost entirely from images.
Show the faults, deliberately
The instinct is to photograph an object at its best. It is the wrong instinct, and it costs money twice.
A buyer who receives something with a chip nobody photographed opens a dispute, and that dispute costs more than the chip ever would have. A buyer who saw the chip and bid anyway has priced it in and has no complaint. Photographing damage clearly is not honesty for its own sake; it is what converts an uncertain buyer into a committed one.
The shots that are always needed
The whole object from the front. The back, which is where construction and repairs show. Any mark, signature, stamp or label, close and legible. Every fault. Something in frame giving scale where size is not obvious.
For anything that opens, moves or comes apart, photograph it both ways. For anything sold as a set, photograph the set together and then each piece.
The shot list. Take all of these before anybody has to ask
- The whole object from the front, square on.
- The back, underside or inside, where construction and repairs show.
- Every mark, signature, stamp or label, close and legible, photographed square rather than at an angle.
- Every fault, clearly. A buyer who saw the chip and bid anyway has no complaint. One who did not opens a dispute that costs more than the chip.
- Something in frame for scale where size is not obvious.
- Anything that opens, moves or comes apart, photographed both ways.
- For a specialist assessing it remotely: send at full resolution, not pasted into a document, which strips the detail that mattered.
Light, and why the kit matters less than people think
Diffuse daylight near a window, with the object on a plain background and no direct sun, beats most equipment. The phone in your pocket resolves far more detail than any catalogue will reproduce.
What actually ruins images is flash, which flattens surface and throws hard shadows, and cluttered backgrounds, which make an object look like junk regardless of what it is. Neither problem costs money to fix.
The same images do a second job
Photographs taken before dispatch are the record of what condition an object was in when it left. That record is what resolves a later claim about how it arrived.
So the set taken for the listing is worth keeping rather than deleting once the item sells, and it is worth adding the packing shots to it. The habit costs nothing and it closes the loop that started when the object was first recorded, well before which channel suits an item was even a question.
Photographing for a specialist rather than a buyer
Images sent to somebody assessing an object are doing a different job from images in a listing, and the differences are worth knowing before spending a morning on the wrong ones.
A specialist needs the construction: the underside, the back, the joints, the inside of a lid, the edge of a plate. They need every mark at a size where the characters are unambiguous, photographed square rather than at an angle. They need a scale reference. They do not need the object looking attractive, and a styled photograph is actively less useful than a plain one on a neutral surface.
Send more than seems necessary and send them at full resolution rather than pasted into a document, which frequently reduces them to the point where the detail that mattered is gone. Somebody deciding whether to take an object on will usually reply from good photographs and will otherwise ask for exactly these, a week later.
What buyers ask for that was not photographed
The questions that arrive after a listing goes up are a reliable guide to what the images left out, and they repeat across almost every category.
Buyers ask for the underside, the back, and the inside. They ask for a close view of any area where wear would be expected. They ask about a specific damage they can half-see at the edge of an existing photograph, which is worse than not photographing it at all because it now looks concealed.
They also ask for a shot with something in frame for scale, and for the item in ordinary light rather than staged, because they are trying to work out what it will actually look like in a room.
Photographing those before anybody asks removes a round of correspondence per enquiry and, more usefully, removes the hesitation that stops somebody bidding rather than making them ask.
None of this requires equipment anybody has to buy. It requires deciding what the person on the other end needs to see, and then photographing that rather than photographing the object as its owner sees it. Those two are rarely the same, and the gap between them is where most disappointing listings come from.
Common questions
How many images is too many?
Rarely a problem in the direction people worry about. Buyers skip what they do not need and cannot invent what is missing, so the risk of too few is much larger than the risk of too many. The one thing worth avoiding is padding with near-identical shots of the same angle, which buries the informative images among repeats and makes a listing tiring to read.
Do photographs need to be edited before use?
Correcting exposure and straightening a crooked frame is reasonable and helps. Removing marks, evening out damage or adjusting colour past what the object actually looks like is not, and it creates a real problem: a buyer comparing the object in hand against the image has grounds for a dispute, and the seller has no answer. The test is whether an edit changes what the object is rather than how well it is lit.