@musicyouneed wrote:
I like many of you spend a lot of time taking photo's, deciding on the best picture, cropping etc. At one point I could use eBay watermarking on the photo's which I liked. Someone had used my pictures on their listing and I asked them to do their own which they did.
I don't like the fact that eBay is not allowing that in future. I was going to make my own watermark and came across this on .com.
No text or artwork on photos
No text or artwork (such as “free shipping” or seller logos) may be added to photos. Copy that is essential to your listing should be placed in the title, subtitle, or item description.
Does that mean I cannot use musicyouneed at the bottom of the photo?
As usual, eBay.com USA is contradicting itself in one area of ebay.com USA and another.
The document that you refer to as having the text you mention above is here.
http://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/listing/create-effective-listings/take-great-pictures.html
However if you search eBay.com US Help for policies on this, you get rules for watermarking where having text with your eBay id is allowed.
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/pictures.html
Adding a watermark to your photos
If you'd like to add a watermark on your photos, follow these guidelines:
We only allow watermarks for ownership and attribution.
Watermarks shouldn't distract from the image.
Watermarks can't serve a marketing purpose, such as specific details about your item or customer service.
Watermarks should be no bigger than 5% of the total image area.
Watermarks should have an opacity of no more than 50%.
Links aren't allowed in watermarks.
Best practices and quality standards
To make sure buyers get a good look at the item they're thinking about purchasing:
Try to use a photo that is at least 1600 pixels on the longest side. However, we recommend you don't enlarge smaller images to make them 1600 pixels. The photos you use must be at least 500 pixels on the longest side.
You can upload photos in these file formats:
JPEG (.jpg file extension)
PNG (.png file extension)
TIFF (.tif file extension)
BMP (.bmp file extension)
GIF (.gif file extension)
If your photo is in JPEG format, it should have a quality of 90 or higher on the 0-99 JPEG quality scale. We then optimize it for display in your listing.
Photos can't have borders or text on them, with the exception of a watermark showing that the photo belongs to you.
The New Advanced Listing Tool no longer has an option in the tool to watermark a listing with your eBay ID or the eBay watermark logo. See this FAQ on the New Advanced Listing tool.
http://pages.ebay.com/sell/advancedtoolfaq.html
What happened to Photo watermarks?
Usage of Photo watermarks has been on the decline and has not been shown to improve selling success. Additionally, we’ve changed the image and text theft policy, which eliminates the need to include photo watermarks.
The image and text theft policy is here.
http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/image-text.html
How to prevent users from using your images
You may want to use watermarks or other identifiers to deter picture theft by other sellers. Learn more about adding watermarks to your photos.
I do believe eBay is moving to no watermarking and that may be enforced in the next eBay Seller Update or the one after. Technically since policies still exist that allow watermarking, you should not have issues watermarking today.
One issue is how to meet the very specific watermark rules for size and opacity in the policy I listed above. A seller could use an outside free tool to watermark the photos before uploading to eBay. But having a third party tool that conforms to the specific eBay image watermarking rules can be difficult to find or even know how to set it to conform to the policy.
eBay member shipscript has a few free tools for watermarking images but when I looked a the tools, they were designed in the past and have options that allow watermarking that does not seem to conform to current policy. I will send here a private message to come read this topic and comment on the policy and her tools.
One of the ironies of removing the eBay watermarking tools in the eBay New Advanced Listing Tool is that eBay had a copy of the image uploaded that was not watermarked before adding their own. This meant they could have a watermark free copy of the images for their catalog. Forcing sellers to add their watermark to the images before uploading the images to eBay marks the images so eBay cannot easily use them.
Supposedly a seller can opt out of eBay taking the sellers images for their catalog. But apparently the opt out option is no longer available according to another recent topic in these forums.
http://community.ebay.ca/t5/Seller-Central/New-Advanced-Listing-Tool-Announced/m-p/370989
I apologize for this long post. But researching takes time and I like to be thorough and have references to back up what I understand. I remember looking into images and eBay policies when they changes the image policy a few years back to have a minimum of 500 pixels on the longest side and made all the changes to the image policies. Not much has changes since that big change but the current eBay direction seems to be to discourage watermarking on images.
