eBay

classyhost · ‎04-26-2019

There was just No Image little icon at this address; http://thumbs1.ebaystatic.com/pict/04040_0.jpg but somebody has placed a huge 1600x1600 image at this location a week ago. So instead of icons eBay affiliate feed started displaying this huge image and it totally killed all mine and our customers websites, it just started breaking the layout, an example is here: www.puppymotion.com . Thousands of websites got killed. Ebay Developers can't help. I have asked eBay Partner Network to remove this huge image and upload a small size icon at this location but they did nothing for a week already. Can somebody help with suggestion of what to do? Thank you.

berserkerplanet · ‎04-26-2019

Somebody didn't do it - eBay did it. Those images are named, resized images and thumbnail images generated by eBay from seller uploaded photos.

Can't tell if it is an EPN error or an eBay images error, but the file path for that image indicates that thumbnail is an oddball compared to the other thumbnails on your webpage, so I lean towards EPN or whatever grabs the data for you page being to blame and retrieving the wrong thumbnail (it looks like a generic placeholder image for a full size eBay gallery)

So either a one time processing glitch, an edge case bug in the eBay image processing software, or an EPN issue, but 100% eBay's doing, and eBay would either need to remove the image, and/or close any software loophole/bug that might exist, or fix the software glitch that causes that incorrect image to be retrieved.

No idea how your website operates, but in theory you control content there and should be able to filter out that image using scripts, PHP, server level filtering etc.

Alternatively, you could resize the image using CSS by just adding adding this to the style.css stylesheet for the pages:

img[src="http://thumbs1.ebaystatic.com/pict/04040_0.jpg"]{width:140px !important;}

or disappear it completely with

img[src="http://thumbs1.ebaystatic.com/pict/04040_0.jpg"]{visibility:hidden !important; width:140px !important;}

Thought a bit about replacing the giant image with a resized version of the thumbnail from the actual listing page https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/kNkAAOSwLw1bXBMV/s-l64.jpg which is the 64px x 64px thumbnail I think represents the variation choice that mistaken placeholder image is for, but it isn't possible in CSS3 and would require JavaScript added to teh page to perform that task (the ::after or ::before pseudo selectors along with the content:url(url) property would be the only CSS way, but those pseudo selectors can't be used with IMG elements, and even if they could, the content result can't be styled and resized correctly)

One of the two CSS rules I showed above added to your site style.css file would do the trick for now in terms of getting that errant image under control and preserving your page layout.