Most listing photo advice is about lighting and styling. This is not that. This is the mechanical half — the things that are either right or wrong, that nobody notices until a customer does, and that take about four minutes to check with the right tools.
1. Is it actually big enough?
Marketplaces scale your photo up to fill their layouts, and a picture that looked fine on your screen can arrive soft and blurry on a desktop gallery. Check the real pixel size with the print size checker, which also tells you the largest size it holds at 300 dpi — the number that matters if the photo is ever printed on packaging or a card.
Do not upscale to hit a number. Enlarging invents pixels, it never adds detail, and the result looks worse than the honest smaller version.
2. Is the transparency real?
If the photo is a cut-out on a transparent background, check it is genuinely transparent and not a picture of a checkerboard, and that it has no invisible pixels stretching its edges. The transparent PNG checker answers both, and fixes both. Invisible pixels are the reason a design "mysteriously" prints smaller than expected: the empty margin is part of the file, so the artwork shrinks to fit inside it.
3. Is the background clean?
A white-ish background that is not actually white reads as grubby next to competitors on a white page. Either shoot on white and check the corners, or clear it properly with the background remover and place the product on a background you control.
Watch the edges after any removal. A pale rim left by the old background is invisible on a white page and obvious on a dark one — and dark is exactly where a shopper's phone in dark mode will put it.
4. Will the crop survive?
Your photo is cropped differently in the search grid, on the listing, in the app, and in the share card. Anything important near an edge will be cut in at least one of them. Leave margin, and check what happens to a square crop before you find out from a review.
5. Is the file too heavy?
A 12 MB photo does not look better than a 900 KB one on a phone screen; it just loads slower, and slow galleries lose people. If a picture is enormous, resize it to the largest size it will ever be shown at, rather than uploading the camera original.
6. What does the link look like when it is shared?
This is the check almost nobody runs, and the one with the biggest gap between effort and result. When you post your listing to a group, a board or a chat, the platform builds a card from tags in the page. If the picture is missing or the wrong shape, your link is a bare line of text next to competitors with pictures.
Run it through the link preview checker. For a listing that is not public yet, the browser extension checks the page in front of you, draft or not.
The four-minute version
- Real pixel size — print size checker.
- Transparency and hidden pixels — transparent PNG checker.
- Background and edges — background remover.
- Crop margin — look at it as a square.
- File weight — resize if it is enormous.
- Share card — link preview checker.
None of these need an account, and none of them upload your photos except the two that have to fetch a web page.
Everything linked here is free to use, runs in your browser, and needs no account. If something in this post is wrong or out of date, it is worth telling us — the date at the top is the last time it was checked.