About 5 months ago my Mum started using Ebay, she asked me to take some photos that she could use to show off what she was trying to sell - which I did. Problem was they were massive, I always take my photos at the highest size my camera supports (4/5 mega pixels, can't remember exactly and too lazy to find out) and uploading a 3+ meg photo that will then be shrunk to 400 x 400 is pretty pointless, so I would go in cropping and scaling the photos.
To start with it was ok, the odd picture here or there, but when she started doing 20 photos at a time it took longer and longer to do. Also, me being busy (erm... lazy) meant she also had to wait for me to edit the photos. I decided it would be easier for everyone if she could edit the pictures herself.
Enter EbayEd...
My solution was to write a small application designed specifically for cropping, scaling, and saving photos for Ebay. It's designed for people who don't generally use computers (my Mum) and is cheaper than Photoshop (it's free). I was going for the 'less is more' approach to EbayEd so there are no complicated features, and there is nothing difficult to learn. You load an image, rotate if necessary, position and size the output frame, and hit save.
If you know what you're doing this isn't all that much harder to use than Photoshop but for the uninitiated it saves having to explain about image resizing, cropping, the difference between save and save for web, and the pros and cons of different image formats - and it's free (did I mention that?).
What used to take me 30 minutes now takes 3. I suspect it will take Mum a bit longer since she has to learn to use it, but once she gets the hang of things there'll be no stopping her.
6 Responses to “EbayEd – Ebay Image Editor” Leave a reply ›
Great little application. Can I request some simple additions? Firstly, being able to drag/drop images onto the application to open them would be great, and secondly to set the default 'save' filename to the current filename (to easily overwrite the original with the new slimline cropped version)
I've been looking for a simple application like this for ages. If only you could choose a filesize 'limit' to constrain the saved JPG to (such as 100kb), and it would resize/resample the photo automatically...
Nice work
Having just installed it i have had to uninstall it as every time i tried to open an image there was none there, when i know there is, also it kept shutting down on me"having encountered problems or some such" am i doing summat wrong or has it been bugged?
Dexi - Sorry it doesn't work for you. I am afraid I have no idea what to suggest as it works just fine for me, on both XP and Vista (and I have just tested the download so know it is so)
Hi Ben,
I have been using your program for a few months on two different computers, both running Windows XP. I works great! I love it. It saves so much time and messing around. I've never had a problem with it ever, and thank you so much for making this nifty application available to the world for free! YOU ROCK!
Hey Linda - I'm really glad you like it and are making good use of it
Thanks for letting me know