Corrupt photo uploads on website when they've been dragged & dropped from Apple Photos
Hi,
I've just discovered this forum and would like to report a bug that's been present for months.
When uploading photos to a listing through the eBay website, they *sometimes* end up corrupted.
This seems to happen mostly with photos that have been cropped to an uneven aspect ratio (i.e. very different width vs height)
Steps to reproduce :
1. Start creating an eBay listing through the website using Google Chrome on macOS
2. Take an item photo on an iPhone, wait for it to sync through iCloud Photos (I think this step may be important because it creates a photo in HEIC format)
3. On the Mac, crop the photo in Apple Photos to make it much wider than a square (often needed to crop out undesired background from an item photo)
4. Drag the photo from Apple Photos to the eBay listing page in Chrome to add it.
5. Expected: the photo should be added to the item normally. Actual : the photo sometimes ends up corrupt/distorted (see example attached). This happens more often when it's very wide.
wastingtime101
·3 years agoIf this is happening when you're cropping in Photos before uploading to eBay, then my suggestion is to upload to eBay and crop with eBay's photo editor.
I'd also suggest all lead images should remain squares (so keep that in mind when taking photos, allowing enough clear background space) because on the app, all images in search are automatically cropped to squares. Buyers will see full images when opening the listing, but in search view rectangular images will be cut off.
reno08
OP3 years agoGood point about keeping images square for lead images, I didn't realize, thanks.
I'm not going to use the eBay photo editor just for cropping though, it's too time consuming to split the editing process in 2 stages.
I can work around the issue by first exporting the images from Apple Photos to JPG, then uploading that. It's specifically dragging from Photos into the browser which triggers the issue.
wastingtime101
·3 years agoYeah, I've found Photos to be a nuisance so I don't use it on my MBP. Instead I import images to a folder on my system using Image Capture, then I do my editing in Photoshop (but you can also do a lot of editing with Preview).
If you like using Photos then exporting as JPGs before uploading to eBay is a good way to go. One extra step, but avoids those file corruptions.
reno08
OP3 years agoYep plenty of workarounds, but in any case this is a genuine bug in HEIC format support that eBay should fix.
wastingtime101
·3 years agoAs of last year eBay was not supporting HEIC format. I don't know if that's changed or not. Any idea @shipscript ?
You can change format on your iPhone from HEIC to JPG so you don't have to export JPGs with the Photos app. On the Camera app change from "high efficiency" to "most compatible" when taking product pics.
HEIC is a preferred format, but not everybody is caught up to support it yet. 👎
wastingtime101
·3 years agoScratch that, @shipscript - found the answer here:
https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/listings/adding-pictures-listings?id=4148
eBay does currently support HEIC format.
reno08
OP3 years agoYes, if HEIC wasn't supported I wouldn't be able to drag&drop any photos successfully in the first place using Chrome (I believe Safari does convert photo uploads to JPG automatically for sites that don't support HEIC)