Bit of a non-announcement this one and I’m just following the crowd with something to fill a blog post time-slot.

From 18th November (today) until 18th December, eBay.com is reducing the cost of additional pictures in listings from 15-cents to 10-cents.  Yup – wow, you can pick yourself up off the floor now.

I don’t understand why anyone pays for additional pictures when a simple line of html code will do the same from either a website, or a free online picture hosting service – heck, if you’re stuck, you could even take a webspace on geocities and create a dummy web-catalogue pointing to your eBay listings.

Inserting images into an eBay listing via html has to be one of the easiest programming tasks going, here’s the basics.

Your image goes into html code tags – they are

<img to open the tag, and > to close it.

Inside the tags, there are several properties you have to set up.

First is the source – src=”location-and-name-of-your-picture” – you need the ” ” around the name and location.

Picture alignment can be added to make text wrap around the image, or to have text only above or below it.  The options for horizontal alignment are none / left / center / right.  For example align=”left” will place the picture on the left of the line and text will flow down the right side of it.  Note that again you need to use the ” ” quote marks.

If you want your picture to be a different size to it’s saved size, then you use the height and width attributes, for example height=”300″ and width = “400″ – notice again using the ” ” quotes.  eBay Turbo Lister always tries to strip these (or used to) but it is correct coding to use them.

There are plenty of other attributes you can assign, just remember they all go between the img tags with a space between each one, so that an example might look like this -

<img src=”path/to/my/image.jpg” align=”center” height=”200″ width=”300″ >

The path is the only tricky bit.  look up at the address bar of your browser, the line near the top that begins with http - you have to use that convention within your img tags, and make sure the path you input begins with http://www. otherwise internet browsers don’t know how to read, or where to find the image.

That’s about all there is to the most basic instructions – now you can have a zero-fee day, every day, on eBay when using extra images.  That’s got to be better value than a reduction from 15-cents to 10-cents, hasn’t it?

Ed