Crystal clear, Kristina. Thank you so much. I do have one question, however: I do watercolors and pencil drawings, mostly within A4 boundaries (297mm x 210 mm) on R202 paper (375x275). Landscape is close enough to crop to 4:3 ratio (it's actually 4:2.83). But many of my pictures are portrait, which are, naturally, 3:4. How would you handle those?
So if you are selling the digital file or even a print, my suggestion is to show your prints in context (a frame) so you would start with a 4:3 aspect ratio as your base and then add your prints to the photo. I hope this makes sense!
@@ByKristinaNicole That helps. Since posting my first comment, I've also thought of creating "teasers" by making a 4x3 of a part of the picture. Draw the buyer in by making them want to see the whole pic. Would that work, do you think?
Thank you for the video! So the main listing image should be 2667 x 2000. How about the other 9 images? Should they be square? Also, what should the dimensions of a video be? Square, 4:3 etc..?
There is not a 100% absolute answer here. Here is what you need to consider. In search on mobile the shopper can scroll through all of your photos, including your video without clicking through into your listing. If they do this all images would display as a rectangle/landscape including your video. (5:4 or 4:3 depending on device) I don't have a lot of data on how many shoppers are actually using this feature though. If they don't use this feature and click into your listing and start scrolling the video/images this is where Etsy says square converts best and more than likely it is because square will display without those gray borders. They aren't making it easy on any of us. At this time the best advice I can give is to understand how they are cropping and focus on optimizing for search. Keep your product in that square crop, no matter how you upload, same as your video. Whether you upload as a landscape or vertical, try to keep the most important info dead center! I hope that helps! Let me know if you have questions. I just got your email as well and will reply to that!
@@ByKristinaNicole So are you saying then, 2667 x 2000 for all images and then, keep everything within the center in a square area? If so, how large (width x height) would you make this central square area? And for video, would you do 1920 x 1080 or some other dimension?
Yes, that will work! Just realize (and I didn't cover this in this specific video) that shoppers can swipe through all photos and the video from search (4:3 or 5:4 on mobile) without clicking into the listing. So when shoppers do that those additional photos as a square will get cropped to a 4:3 or 5:4 for that "preview" Again, not sure how many shoppers actually do this, but I just wanted you to have all the info. Etsy doesn't make it easy! Keep doing what is working for you!
Would you recommend editing it in a square format so everything is centered in case it is shown as a square, but then change the edited square to 4:3. It seems like that would be the safest way to make sure nothing will be cut out if they change it from 4:3 to square. Thoughts?
Actually, I typically do this when I go to shoot. I will set up the set and the camera and frame it to where I think it looks good, then I will snap a quick photo on my smartphone and open it in editing, test the 4:3 and square to make sure both crops look good. You could easily adjust the aspect ratios before shooting as well. That is what I do with my DSLR. I don't always go that route with my smartphone because it can be challenging to fully fill the frame on a smartphone so typically some cropping has to be done in editing. I always test the crop to check the framing and the prop placement. This saves so much time in the long run and prevents having to set up again. I also provided you with Canva templates to test the crops in the "Complete Guide to Sizing Images for Etsy" free download!
@@ByKristinaNicole …. Thank you so much for this detailed explanation. I never think about using Canva, I’m going to give that a try. My go to has been Lightroom. Thanks again, Kristina I’ve learned a lot from your photo tips.
I wouldn't really recommend Canva for photo editing per say, but once you test the framing with my canva templates, your eye will start to recognize the limits of each aspect ratio! @@eh9920
If they look warped and funny, like stretched I believe this is a glitch Etsy is trying to resolve. I can’t post a photo here but there are reports that it is being investigated by Etsy! Keep me posted!
I watched few of your videos and I don't get why I should export 80% in snapseed instead of 100% could you please explain again? Even if I follow all the instructions still my pictures don't look perfect using snapseed and I can't understand what I'm doing wrong
Hey! When shooting with a smartphone the file size tends to be similar and it is large! The file size can be reduced with cropping depending on how much of the image you crop out but typically that isn’t enough. Large files sizes do not load well online. So we have the file size to be under 1MB. Typically and 80% quality reduction for a JPEG will result in that. It is ideal if you can get your photo around 500KB. No hard fast number here though.
@ByKristinaNicole Hi Kristina, thank you so much for your reply! I really appreciate it! My pictures look kind of blurry when I upload them on etsy but they look completely fine if I take a look at them in the Snapseed folder on my phone. The format I uploaded is 4:3, 2000px, 100% JPG. I thought it could be because the long side is 2000px and not the short one, but maybe my mistake is that I exported them with 100% JPG... I'm so confused!
@@lucybloom4781 blurry photos can 100% be a large file size, because when your file size is too large Etsy Compresses it. The pixels shouldn't be an issue at this point. I recommend keeping them between 1500-3000 overall. Do you know how to check your photo info to see what your file size is at 100%?
@ByKristinaNicole No, I don't! If I take a look at one of my pictures I see: 1,65 MB, 2000x1500 or 1,88 MB, 2000x1500... basically the MB number always change - sorry I'm very bad at this
I'm have an Android mobile, and my listings show square there, even those which are 4:3, with awful grey borders. and the same listings show as 4:3 on my PC
Within the listing your images will show in the aspect ratio you upload them. When I talk about Etsy making crop changes that is only to the thumbnail (first image) I will tell you right now, no one cares about the gray boarder within your listing on mobile. They won’t even click into your listing if your product is getting cut out of the thumbnail in search. There is no one answer that works across the platform. So again, my suggestions are based on optimizing for search on mobile. (Where most people are hanging out shopping!)
I've looked at a TON of photos in the last month (I'm not kidding, probably close to 1,000) for research, and I have barely noticed gray borders, but I know many have had to have had them. I think we critique it more than the buyers do.
Exactly! As sellers and business owners, we have been trained to be aware of certain things the average person is not. The gray borders have never bothered me as a shopper. I focus more on the quality of the product photos. @@whitneypickle
@@ByKristinaNicole I'm testing out some listings with a colored portion on the outsides of where the mockup didn't fill the canvas. I don't think it looks bad, it brings in continuity since it's the background color that my info pages are, and flows well...at least in my opinion. We shall see. (Without them, my listings had black borders which looked horrible and I couldn't get rid of them).