How long do you keep your photos of items you've listed for sale
I have loads of photos on my phone and was curious as to how long sellers keep these photos on their phones.
22 comments
I have loads of photos on my phone and was curious as to how long sellers keep these photos on their phones.
yuzuha
·2 years agoI delete mine once the buyer has received the item safely. That way, it's a way for me to keep track of what items have sold, since I only have photos of items that I have listed in my Photos folder.
turtles-trading-post
·2 years agoAnother stamp dealer here. Everything is scanned. Photos get deleted whenever I think of it. It's much easier to rescan than to try and find the photo.
sea*dreams
·2 years agoI hold pics of previously owned items for a year.
I hold pics of new with tags items for 3 years.
I hold the NWT items longer because I often find them again when scouting for stuff and it saves me having to take new pics and once or twice has saved me because the duplicate I just bought didn't have a belt or scarf that the original did and I was able to make sure I listed the item as New with Defects and named the missing part.
krazzykats
·2 years agoI have several portable drives that have been purchased through the years. And probably most of everything I have ever photographed or scanned on one of them...
It's always a new adventure looking through the drives once in a while. ðŸ˜
gator08041971
·2 years agoTo add to my earlier posting... I use an older iPhone 6S to take the pictures. It has my MS office OneDrive installed on it. So, I take the pictures, open the OneDrive, that automatically syncs the pictures with my PC, and I can immediately drop them into the listings, or a message to a buyer, within seconds. Kinda nice.
I'm sure the Apple Cloud feature works the same way. But that way, I can purge the old phone once in a while without nuking anything I need.
That phone has no service, its just used solely for ebay photos. That's all it does. lol
mantle1951
·2 years agoI delete them within 1 day or so after listing, just taking up space.
slippinjimmy
·2 years agoI don't use a phone for eBay, I keep ALL my images.....FOREVER. Well sort of forever, I'm missing the pics I used in 1999 but everything from 2000 on is instantly available.
Unfortunately almost all the images from the early years are too small to be used today, a holdover from the early days when small images that loaded quickly were the norm as 25 years ago most people were still using dial-up internet.
katirbe1
OP2 years agoI keep them all, as well!!! I'm just concerned that I'll overload my phone. I do remove the pictures of items I've sold over time, but don't think I catch them all. I appreciate your information!
gloryglorygifts
·2 years agoI have them all saved on my computer, which sometimes turns out to be a very good thing. Case in point, one of my distributors were taken over around 3 years ago. Fast forward to last year, they were actually merged with a larger one and the products are still available, so I didn't have to take all new photos of my items. If I'm still working with the distributor, I keep them. If not, I usually purge them. I've purged like 4 folders of them over the years.
Anything taken with my phone, I delete.
2013grotz
·2 years agoI kept all of mine for quite some time. Mainly just for lack of having to keep them pared down to current items. They are helpful occasionally to remind yourself of what the item looked like in case there's questions. Like was said, ebay policy on returns makes it so what you say is irrelevant, so whatever the buyer says is right even if they're 100% wrong, so there's really no point in keeping them to try to prove yourself to ebay on a complaint. I still have all my pictures for my (old) listings even now. Maybe, if I make a comeback, they'll be useful, but I've since added a ton of other items to my "go" pile, so keeping them might be a moot issue. Don't know yet.
sin-n-dex
·2 years agoI unload my phone when it gets full, and move photos to a laptop. When they're listed, the photos are archived on an external hard drive by month (so if I can see I listed it in April 2023, I know where to look to find the photos).
Generally I have 4000-5000 photos when I unload my phone. Yesterday I took photos of postcards (to fix a bunch of listings that "lost" their photos), and I had 2100 photos from just that day taking pictures. So I'd say I need to unload my phone once or twice a month usually (since I don't photograph every day).
C.
ckimodog
·2 years ago@katirbe1
I keep mine on a USB thumb drive in the event I have a re order or a custom order. My phone? Forget about it. The eBay app has been goofy lately.
Happy Selling.
tobaccocardyahoo
·2 years agoMy phone has no role in the listing process.
Storage is cheap and I have pictures which go back many years on external drives.
toysaver
·2 years agoone minute
kensgiftshop
·2 years agoI don't keep any of the photos on my phone.
I store them all on my PC along with the descriptions and I've got them from the time I started selling here.
gator08041971
·2 years agoPersonally, I have been complacent in not deleting them lately, but typically I would hold on to some for up to a year. Best case scenario, 6 months is plenty of time. But as Simba above stated, often having the picture is more a for you thing, than anything useful for ebay in case of an issue.
I already send buyers a message with photos of the purchased item from during the packaging and the package as labeled and that gets sent through the ebay system now. If that isn't enough proof, not sure what else would be. Biggest thing is to track serial numbers and any identifiers as a just in case.
*shrug
sin-n-dex
·2 years agoSome weird phenomenon happened to my antique postcards in SixBit, and all the photos except the last one (of it showing the lot number packed up) were deleted. Then it synced with eBay at some point and deleted them all on eBay too. I had to replace the photos of the front and back of the card (and postmark if it applies). Having kept photos for the past two years I was able to go and pull a bunch from archive to fix my listings. The photos from 2021 were already deleted because the external drive only has so much space, so I had to take those again. I spent 6 hours taking photos of 300 postcards so I can fix my listings. That part would have been done if I had archive going back far enough (but I don't generally think I need photos once it's listed, it's just in this case it was helpful).
C.
reallynicestamps
·2 years agoPhotos?
why?
Don't you have a scanner?
It takes perhaps two minutes to scan a postcard twice (600 dpi and 1200 dpi) and the same for the back (or a detail like a post mark or receiver) if that seems important .
Then they are all on my desktop ready to be used, filed, or trashed.
sin-n-dex
·2 years agoI get more SNADs when I scan stuff. Like the coin I sold where I got a complaint there were all sorts of marks on it. The scanner light was so nice and bright it washed out all the nicks and scratches and left me with a neg (which was eventually resolved with the buyer, but he actually believed I tricked him by scanning the coin).
Since then, I don't scan anything. You can see damage a lot more if it's photographed using eBay's zoom tool in the listing. I haven't had SNADs very often on anything I've actually taken photos of.
C.
reallynicestamps
·2 years agoMost of my stuff is flat/2D.
I've tried scanning medallions, pinbacks, tee shirts (labels), etc and you are right, scans just don't word for those.
Stamps? Easy peasy.
johnjefprks
·2 years agoOnce they are uploaded and I have checked the listing, I delete them.
simba6
·2 years agoThey are of no use in winning any cases. Once the item is sold you can dump them.