Many photographers sell some of their pictures on eBay. But how do you get visitors to see them? One option is to use the website's picture service. The first photo is free, but each additional image is $0.15, while a supersize photo costs another $0.75. This can lower your profits if, for example, you have 3-4 photos showing various angles and a supersize one to provide a higher impact.



A better solution would be to find another way of putting your photos online without paying for these eBay fees. There are plenty of image hosting websites tou can choose from. Some of the are free, while others only charge a small fee per month or year and allow you to upload a lot of photos. Photobucket is a good option. Their starter package is free and offers 25 MB of storage space. They also have a premium package with unlimited disk space, which costs $9.00 for 3 months and $25.00 for a full year.

To upload your pictures on Photobucket or another hosting site you first need to resize them. The first reason why you have to do this is that Photobucket does not allow photos larger than 250 KB for the free package and 1 MB for the premium package. Secondly, uploading large image files will slow down your eBay listings. If they have to wait for one minute for the picture to load, potential customers will just click the back button. It is recommended to upload photos that are no larger than 500 pixels. You can resize your photos with a free image editing application such as Irfanview. Once they are resized, it is very simple to put them online. On Photobucket, all you have to do is log in to your account. Once you;re there, there is a white box on top marked as 'picture' and a browse button next to it. If you click it, a 'choose file' window will show up, allowing you to browse through the files on your PC. Look for the photo you want, click on it and then click the 'open' button in the 'choose file' window. The name and location of the file will appear in the box and all you need to do is click 'submit'. Now you have the picture on Photobucket. There is also an option to upload several photos at once.

So you have the photos on Photobucket, but how do you put them in your eBay listings? To do this you will need to copy the URL of the photo on Photobucket and paste it into the listing on eBay. The URL is directly under the photo. Here is the html code you need to use in order to display the photo in the eBay listing: img src="the picture's URL". If you want to add a border, the code is img src="the picture's URL" border=9. You can make the border thicker or thinner by increasing or decreasing the number after "border".

Another advantage of using an online hosting service is that the quality of the images will be higher than with eBay's picture service. So you have as many photos as you want on auction, with better quality and for a lower price. You can't ask for better! Good luck with your auctions!