Photographing comics for listing: the setup that works
A comic photograph has two jobs: convince a person, and be legible to whatever software touches it afterwards. They mostly want the same things, and where they differ it is worth knowing which one you are serving.
The setup
- A plain mat or a plain table. One flat colour that is not the colour of the comic. Everything downstream that finds the comic in the frame does it by finding where the mat stops, so a patterned tablecloth or a wood grain is the one avoidable handicap.
- The whole cover in frame, with mat visible around all four edges. A cover shot that runs off the edge of the picture cannot be cropped, cannot be squared up, and looks to a buyer like something is being hidden.
- Even light, from the side you are not standing on. The enemy is glare on a bagged comic: a bag is a mirror, and a window or a ceiling light behind you lands in the middle of the cover. Light from one side, camera square over the comic.
- Shoot square over the comic, not at an angle. A keystoned cover reads as an amateur listing and makes the edges hard to judge, which is exactly what a buyer is trying to judge.
Pick a number of shots and keep it
This seller's rhythm is ten photographs a comic: front cover, the four corners, back cover, the spine, and whatever the comic makes him want to show.
The interesting part is what that number is FOR. If you shoot a whole box in one session, something has to decide where one comic's photographs end and the next comic's begin. The obvious answer is the pause between shots. Measured over 9,642 frames and 987 comics from this seller's own boxes, the pauses are not good enough on their own: 262 gaps inside a single comic are 15 seconds or longer, because he stops in the middle. Told the shot count instead, the same grouping left 15 comics unlisted and split 25, against 29 and 78 on the gaps alone. Better on both kinds of error, not a trade between them.
So: pick a number of shots and give every comic the same number. Ten is his, because 79.5% of his comics are exactly ten shots and 85% are ten or eleven. Yours can be four. What costs you is varying it comic by comic, which is also the thing that feels most natural.
Shoot the front cover FIRST, every time. It is the first photograph that identifies the comic, to a buyer scrolling a search page and to any software reading the box. If you lose count and one comic gets nine, that is a local error rather than a box-wide one: the grouping weighs each cut on its own, and a row that came out short is repaired on the review screen with the split and merge controls rather than by re-shooting the box.
eBay takes 24 pictures, and the first one is doing most of the work
Twenty-four images per listing is eBay's cap, so ten is comfortable. But the gallery image is what a buyer sees in search results, and everything else is only seen by somebody who has already clicked. Spend your care on the front cover; the corners are evidence for the person who is already interested.
What makes a photo unreadable
- Glare across the title. The commonest one, and the only one that is fatal: if the logo cannot be read, neither a buyer skimming nor a machine can tell what the comic is.
- The comic filling the whole frame. Attractive, and it removes the margin anything needs to find the edges of the cover.
- Shadow from your own hand or phone. A hard shadow across a corner reads as damage to the corner, which is the exact thing a comic buyer is looking at.
- A close-up with no context. A detail shot of a tear is useful; a detail shot that could be any comic is not, and if it is the first shot of a comic nothing can tell which comic it belongs to.
Cropping: better refused than wrong
Cropping a cover in close is free, and the risk is cutting into it. Point and Sell crops a photograph only when it is sure, which means covers on the mat come out tidy and most detail shots ship exactly as they were taken.
The rule accepts a crop only when three things are true at once: what would be removed is at least 85% mat, the shape left behind is comic-shaped (a width-to-height ratio between 0.58 and 0.80, where a comic measures about 0.65 and a magazine about 0.77), and the crop actually gains something. Measured against box 70 AA's 247 photographs it accepted 61 crops and left 186 as shot, and every one of the 61 was a full front or back cover on the mat, checked by eye.
Two honest notes on that number. Those 247 were mostly covers; on a later box with more detail shots in it the rule fired on 18% of the photographs, so do not read 61 of 247 as a rate for your own box. And the first version of the rule, with the bounding box alone and none of those three tests, accepted 107 and cut INTO 40 of them, close-up shots where a pale patch of cover read as mat. That is the shape of this whole problem. A crop that refuses costs you a slightly loose photograph; a crop that is confidently wrong sends a buyer a listing whose main picture has the logo sliced off.
Lots: shoot the group shot last
A lot needs a group shot: the run fanned out so the issue numbers are visible. Shoot the individual issues first and that frame LAST, after a clear pause, which is both how this seller shoots and what the product expects. Point and Sell moves a lot's final frame to the front of the listing itself when it follows that pause, so the fanned-out run is what a buyer sees in search while the individual covers stay where identification can read them.
File size and format
Shoot at whatever your phone does; it will be far bigger than eBay needs. What matters is that the long edge is at least 1,600 pixels, which is what eBay's zoom needs, and 1,600 is what a listing image here ends up as. iPhone HEIC files are fine as a source as long as whatever you upload with converts them to JPEG; HEIC is not a format eBay accepts. On the phone, Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible makes new photographs JPEG.
What this page is not. Nobody here photographs comics for a living, and none of this is a studio setup. It is what one working seller's table produced across several thousand photographs, with the failures named.
Try it on a box · More guides for comic sellers
Sources
The grouping measurement is over 9,642 frames and 987 comics from this seller's own boxes. The crop rule was measured on box 70 AA's 247 photographs at listing size and checked by eye on contact sheets; the 18% figure is from box 76 AA, 153 photographs, on the shipped feature. The lot rhythm is measured over 35 boxes: 19 of the 20 lot-sized groups lead with the frame shot last. The 24-image cap is eBay's. All of these are recorded in this product's decision log.