Newbie PLEASE HELP

Hi. I have just purchased a d3200 for ebay photo's. I am an absolute novice and when I try to upload ebay photos using the large and fine settings using the max megapixels ebay will not accept them. If I use small and fine they will accept the photo's but the stock picture is cropped. An ebay photo guide states that the pictures will be automatically accepted by ebay and will be full size if they are 2mp or less?? Surely this will give poor pictures and it seems that if this is the case there was no point buying such a good camera. Im struggling please help. I tried to copy a link with the picture requirements but it wont let me. If someone could check It and advise how to get the best out of my d3200 I would be very very grateful.

Best would be saving your files and export them for web.

Welcome to Nikonites.

I really can't help on that . I don't deal with e-bay.
Somebody will come along soon.

It does not take a huge file to look just fine on eBay.

You can experiment with the image quality and size settings. Per the D3200 manual, JPEG Normal/Small or JPEG Basic/Medium will yield a file size of approximately 1.9MB. JPEG Basic/Small approximately 1MB.

You will probably want to also experiment with the Picture Controls to get the camera set to take JPEGs you can use without any additional post processing.

philipsno2 said:

Hi. I have just purchased a d3200 for ebay photo's. I am an absolute novice and when I try to upload ebay photos using the large and fine settings using the max megapixels ebay will not accept them. If I use small and fine they will accept the photo's but the stock picture is cropped. An ebay photo guide states that the pictures will be automatically accepted by ebay and will be full size if they are 2mp or less?? Surely this will give poor pictures and it seems that if this is the case there was no point buying such a good camera. Im struggling please help. I tried to copy a link with the picture requirements but it wont let me. If someone could check It and advise how to get the best out of my d3200 I would be very very grateful.

Click to expand...

shoot at small/fine jpeg. more than enough rez. even too much. use a tripod, mirror lock up, stop down to f/8. yes even the cheaply budget d3200 is way overkill for internet images. imagine that. 24mp is just a tad too much for a 250kb image for the web.

Adding photos to your listing

it says 7mb. doesnt say each. so im guessing all weighing no more than 7mb.

man how many of these NEWBIE PLEASE HELP posts we get a day haha

As said, D3200 at 24MP is an over kill, when you need 2MP. A reasonable cell phone is 5MP+. Any way, now that you have it do the following
. Shoot jpeg fine.
. Open the image in View NX-2 supplied with the camera (else download the latest version from Nikon Site). Then Convert the files to smaller sizes


The output images will be small. If you feel that they are too small, increase the "Long Edge" size.

Megapixels is just one of many camera perks (and as you've discovered, an often overrated one at that).

Optics is another one. There's only so much a plastic, 5mm-wide, fingerprints ridden lens could do with light.

Control, of aperture and speed. With a wide aperture you can try and isolate the subject by blurring the background (useful if trying to sell stuff in a crowded place (a lamp in a thrift shop, a car in a parking lot, ...)

You can screw a filter to it. A polarizing one, maybe, to get a bit of control over reflections if you're selling, well, reflective stuff.

Low-light/high ISO capabilities so you maybe could shoot that billiard table in the basement without taking it to the outside sun.

Etc.

I'm a product photographer for a camera store on eBay so let me give you the spec.

eBay will SQUARE any image you up load so if possible crop your images in 1:1 format.
Export your jpeg as 1000x1000 pixels. You can do bigger but it's useless as eBay will down grade them for you.
Save your jpeg images in MEDIUM quality - if using photoshop or lightroom, no more than quality setting of 60%. Don't waste your time and disk space to save at High or 100% - eBay will down grade them for you when you upload the images to their site.

Take a look at the photo here - all the images are my work. They are all exported as 1000 pixels on the long side - notice in some images which I didn't crop as a square (1:1), eBay makes it square and fills in with blank background. All images are export (by Lightroom) with quality setting at 50% .

I have attached the settings page for my Lightroom export that I use.
As for equipment I use mostly a Nikon D5000 - sometimes the D60 and a few with my D7100 (way overkill!) All images taken with Tamron 60mm Macro lens. All objects are lighted with 3 strobes, one on each side and one on top. Strobes 18"-24" from objects. Seamless background is a white 1/32" thick plastic sheet. All images shot tether to my MacBook Pro (15" Retina)

Hope this helps. I'm happy to answer question about product photography for eBay as I do this for a living!

For those who worry that 2 mb Jpeg is not enough resolution for good pictures (for eBay), look at the directory listing of the folder I use for my Seawood eBay pictures - notice the size - they are all only about 200 Kbytes with a few going over 300Kb and then look at the pictures on the eBay site. Hope you are convinced that it's more than enough. So, don't worry, it's not the size of the file that matters - JPEG is great a compressing images into small files and don't go overboard with the "quality" setting - eBay will down resolve them for you if they are too high!