Photographing comics for listing: the setup that works
A comic photograph has two jobs: sell the comic to a person, and be readable by whatever software touches it next. Mostly they want the same things.
The setup
- A plain mat or a plain table. One flat colour that is not the colour of the comic. Software finds the comic by finding where the mat stops, so a patterned tablecloth or wood grain works against you.
- The whole cover in frame, with mat showing on all four edges. A cover that runs off the edge of the picture cannot be cropped or squared up, and to a buyer it looks like something is being hidden.
- Even light, from the side you are not standing on. Glare is the enemy on a bagged comic: the bag is a mirror, and a window or ceiling light behind you lands in the middle of the cover.
- Shoot square over the comic, not at an angle. A tilted cover looks amateur and makes the edges hard to judge, and the edges are what a buyer is judging.
Pick a number of shots and keep it
My rhythm is ten photographs a comic: front cover, the four corners, back cover, the spine, and whatever that comic needs to show.
The number matters more than it looks. When you shoot a whole box in one go, something has to decide where one comic's photos end and the next begin. The pause between shots is not reliable on its own, because you stop in the middle of a comic. A fixed shot count is. So pick a number and give every comic the same number. Ten is mine; yours can be four. Varying it comic by comic is what costs you.
Shoot the front cover FIRST, every time. It is the photo that identifies the comic, to a buyer scrolling search and to any software reading the box. If you lose count and one comic gets nine, fix that row on the review screen with split and merge rather than re-shooting the box.
eBay takes 24 pictures, and the first one does most of the work
Twenty-four images per listing is eBay's cap, so ten is comfortable. The gallery image is what a buyer sees in search; everything else is seen only by someone who already clicked. Spend your care on the front cover.
What makes a photo unreadable
- Glare across the title. The commonest one: if the logo cannot be read, neither a buyer nor a machine can tell what the comic is.
- The comic filling the whole frame. It looks good and leaves no margin to find the edges of the cover.
- Shadow from your hand or phone. A hard shadow across a corner reads as damage to the corner.
- A close-up with no context. A detail shot of a tear is useful. As the first shot of a comic, nothing can tell which comic it belongs to.
Cropping
Point and Sell crops a photo only when it is sure, so covers shot on the mat come out tidy and most detail shots stay as you took them. A slightly loose photo costs you nothing; a crop that slices off the logo costs you the sale.
Lots: shoot the group shot last
A lot needs a group shot: the run fanned out so the issue numbers show. Shoot the single issues first and the group shot LAST, after a short pause. Point and Sell then moves that group shot to the front of the listing, so it is what a buyer sees in search.
File size and format
Shoot at whatever your phone does; it will be far bigger than eBay needs. The long edge should be at least 1,600 pixels for eBay's zoom. iPhone HEIC photos are fine as long as whatever you upload with converts them to JPEG, because eBay does not take HEIC. On the phone, Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible makes new photos JPEG.