Prepare and Upload eBay Pictures with Fast Photos

8 of 10 in Series: The Essentials of Preparing and Uploading Your eBay Images

If you want a simple, all-in-one photo-editing and FTP program designed especially for e-commerce and eBay sellers, then you should give Fast Photos by Pixby Software a try. The developers knew exactly what processes online sellers need for their images and included just those — and nothing else. There are tools for cropping, JPEG compression, sharpening, resizing, enhancing, rotating, and adding watermark text and borders.

The software is a PC application that runs on Windows 98 SE through Vista. For a 21-day free trial, visit the Pixby Web site.

Editing an image for eBay in Fast Photos is simple:

Open the program.
Click Browse and find the directory containing your image.
Find the photo, click it, and then click the Add to Tray button (near the top of the screen).

Selecting a photo for editing in Fast Photos.
Choose Edit.
Click to perform any of the following tasks:

Editing your image.
- Rotate: If you’ve shot your picture sideways or upside-down, you can rotate it here.
- Crop: In Crop mode, a gray rectangle appears with corner dots. Click a corner dot, drag the rectangle until it closes in on your item, and then click Apply.
- Enhance: Brighten, darken, increase, or decrease the contrast and work with image gamma and color. Don’t worry — everything you do is visible on-screen and can be undone if you mess things up.
- Resize: You can resize your image to the standard eBay sizes or make the image a custom size.
- Sharpen: Is your image a little fuzzy? Click here to bring out the details.
- Add border: If you want a border or a drop shadow on your image, you can apply it here.
- Add text: Type your user ID so you can watermark your images (which helps dissuade those who try to use your images as their own).
- JPEG compress: By moving a sliding bar, you can compress the image as much as you dare. The more you compress, the less detailed the image will be.
To save the changes you’ve made to your image, click Save As and give your file a name.

Now you can upload your newly edited image to the Web. Just choose Publish (on the toolbar).

To set up an FTP account for uploading, click the Add button on the Publish screen. The screen shown below appears. Input the data required for your FTP server, click OK, and then upload your image with a mouse click.