Sandra sells handmade ceramic mugs on Etsy and the occasional vintage find on eBay. She photographs everything on a white backdrop with a mirrorless camera, which produces beautifully detailed shots that look incredible — and weigh somewhere between 7 and 12MB each. Etsy's upload limit is 20MB per image, which sounds fine until you're trying to upload 10 photos per listing and the whole page just… freezes. Repeatedly.
She estimated she was spending an extra 20 minutes per listing just waiting for photos to upload, failing, refreshing, and trying again. At 30 new listings per month, that's 10 hours of her life, monthly, staring at upload spinners. She is not exaggerating. She kept a log.
The Problem
Sandra's photos were large in two ways: file size and pixel dimensions. Her camera was shooting at 6000×4000 pixels — far more than any marketplace platform displays. Etsy shows product images at a maximum of 2000 pixels wide. eBay is similar. Uploading a 6000-pixel image means you're sending 9 times more data than the platform will ever actually use. The extra pixels just sit there, wasting upload bandwidth.
Her eBay experience was slightly different — eBay has a file size limit of 7MB per image, which meant some of her photos were being silently rejected without a useful error message. She spent a baffling afternoon wondering why her listing preview was showing broken image icons before a fellow seller in an eBay forum diagnosed the cause.
She'd tried using her phone camera as a compromise, but the results didn't look as professional. She'd tried emailing photos to herself to get a smaller version (a trick that sort of works on iPhone) but it wasn't reliable or fast. She needed a proper workflow.
The Fix
Another Etsy seller in her maker community mentioned jpeg-optimizer.net — specifically that it was free and required no software. Sandra tried it skeptically. She dragged in one of her mug photos, compressed it, and compared the result side-by-side with the original at screen zoom.
The file went from 9.2MB to 480KB. The image on screen looked identical. She uploaded the compressed version to a test listing and it went through immediately — no spinner, no freeze, no retry. She sat there for a moment, genuinely annoyed that she hadn't found this earlier.
She now runs every product photo through the compressor before it touches any marketplace. New listings take her about five minutes, as they always should have. Her uploads go through first try. And her product pages actually load faster for buyers, which she suspects contributes to lower bounce rates on her listings, even if she can't prove it definitively.
What Good Marketplace Image Prep Looks Like
- Compress JPEG files before uploading — most platforms top out at 1–7MB anyway
- Reduce image size to under 1MB for smooth, fast uploads on any connection
- Match pixel dimensions to what the platform actually displays (2000px width is plenty)
- Use a free image compressor with no watermarks — your product photos need to look clean
- Compressed photos load faster for buyers, especially on mobile
- Batch compress your photos before a listing session to save time
Marketplace-Specific Image Tips
Each platform has slightly different limits, and understanding them matters. Etsy accepts JPEGs up to 20MB but recommends much smaller files for performance. eBay has a stricter per-image cap. Facebook Marketplace and Depop have their own preferences. The common thread: compressed, correctly sized images upload faster, look better in listings, and load quicker for buyers who are making purchase decisions on a phone with average mobile data.
For a complete guide to ecommerce image preparation — including recommended dimensions and quality settings for different platforms — see our article on how to prepare images for Shopify and ecommerce. It covers everything from file format choices to compression levels for product photography.
If you're also selling through your own website or a Shopify store alongside your marketplace listings, the overlap is significant. Our post on best image sizes for websites covers what dimensions and file sizes work best for product pages.
Suggested image: A marketplace seller at a desk photographing handmade ceramics, with a laptop open showing an Etsy listing upload screen with a fast-loading progress bar.