Expiration of photos

[everythingvaluable]

When do photos expire when eBay is hosting them?  Is it 90 days like the listings?  They seem to linger a little longer, but I doubt they archive them indefinitely for my relisting needs.

[shipscript]

@everythingvaluable

At a minimum, photos last for at least 90 days after the last listing linked to those photos has ended (sell-similar and relist can link the same photos to multiple listings and drafts might count in there too). Photos could last a few days longer depending on the purge cycle, but eBay does not commit to anything beyond 90 days.  I have some photos and some ended listings that have persisted for years, and I have no idea why they never purged - probably a fluke or maybe related to using them elsewhere on the eBay site.

[pocomocomputing]

When I was using Selling Manager Pro a few years back, you could keep listing templates for products indefinitely after they ended. However after 90 days, the templates would lose their eBay pictures because there were no active listings with the pictures and UnSold and Sold were past 90 days too. I always found this extremely annoying. Selling Manager Pro was not really designed to store inactive listing template and their pictures. It was more for active items that just needed temporary saving to be listed later within 90 days.

I do not know how the Seller Hub will handle old listings past 90 days and their pictures. I suspect they will be deleted after 90 days too from online storage if there were no Active, Sold or UnSold listings less than 90 days. I even had a couple of Scheduled listings that I kept putting off completing years ago and kept rescheduling them into to the future. One day the pictures disappeared as I had kept those incomplete Scheduled Listings for more than 90 days and I suspect that since there were no Active, Sold or UnSold listings with the same picture that this was why the photos were deleted.

It would make sense for eBay to purge all pictures that have no activity after 90 days otherwise their servers would be storing many pictures that would never be used again.

Supposedly the eBay Seller Hub will allow uploading and downloading listings and pictures so a seller would have to archive their old listings on their computer if they needed to keep them for use past 90 days. eBay has never been very clear on what capabilities the Seller Hub will have for uploading and downloading listings and photos. All eBay says is that they will add features to the Seller Hub to replace some features lost when Turbo Lister is retired. It is June and Turbo Lister is to be retired and still no definite information on the Seller Hub features to replace lost Turbo Lister features.

I always kept my photos on my computer that I used for eBay Listings. That way I coud always get a copy if the photos were lost from the eBay listings or from Turbo Lister. Having these photos on my hard drive came in very hand when TurboLister saved listing at 400 pixels for years without my knowing. When the 500 pixel minimum size rules came in a few years ago, many sellers got burned because their photos in TurboLister were reduced in size without their knowing. Many had to take new photos to meet the 500 pixel requirement.