How to Take Pictures for eBay with White Background

As eBay sellers, we want our listing pictures to look as professional as possible and one way to do that is to give our items a white background. It makes them look more like stock photos, similar to Amazon.

I talked about this a little bit in my previous post with 15 eBay Picture Tips, but I wanted to go a little more in depth here with some more ideas.

It’s actually very simple to get a white background on your eBay pictures. In this post, I’m going to share three ways you can do it.

Use Remove.bg on Your Photos

This method doesn’t always work the greatest. You still need to have a fairly clean background, even if it’s just a table set up against a wall. Try not to have other objects in the background that the program has to determine if it should be removed or not.

The pictures you want to remove backgrounds on need to be on your computer or the camera roll/gallery of your phone.

Note: If you take your eBay pictures through the eBay app, they do not get saved to your camera roll. Therefore, I suggest that you take the pictures with your phone’s camera app (that whey they are saved to the camera roll), editing them at remove.bg and then upload them to the eBay app.

Go to remove.bg and simply click the green Select a photo button. Upload your image

Once the file is uploaded, it will take just a few seconds for the program to wipe out the background. When it’s done you’ll see a screen like the one below, with your original picture on the left and the new picture on the right.

Click the green Download button (and I suggest choosing the largest size they will allow you to download).

Wallah, you’re done! Now you can upload it to eBay!

If you’re curious to see how it looks on eBay, I used this example from one of our actual listings and here is what the gallery pic looks like before and after. What a difference!

The downside to using remove.bg to make all your image backgrounds completely white is that it’s going to take you a LOOOONNG time to get all these pictures edited. You can only remove the background on one photo at a time so this is a very painstaking way to do it. But the results look great!!

White Posterboard Background (Our Recommendation)

This is the method we prefer to use simply because it’s cheaper and more time effective for us. It’s not going to give you the best results like the remove.bg program or even like a lightbox would give, but it works well enough for what we’re looking for.

You can buy these white foam poster boards on Amazon or even just pick up a couple of boards at Walmart. They’re fairly cheap and they will last you a while. However, they do get dented and marked up easily, so I recommend having a few extra so you can replace them as they get worn.

Now how this works is, you need two boards, one for the “floor” and one for the “backdrop”. Make sure that your item fits within the size of your board and crop your picture so that only the white background is showing. You can also do this with a black background.

Your set up should look something like this:

Use a Lightbox to Get White Background on Your eBay Pictures

A lightbox is a pretty simple but fairly expensive way to get white backgrounds on your eBay pictures. It’s definately a more advanced option as you also need to know how to adjust the settings on your phone for the optimal look. However, the results look really great and it’s worth the investment if you know what you’re doing (or you’re willing to learn how 😉 )

The Amazon Basics Portable Photo Studio is one of the best I’ve seen as far as customer reviews and functionality. It has multiple options for how to take your pictures. Also, it functions as an all in one option so there is no need to buy additional lighting or accessories. Everything is built in making it very convenient.

Here is a very good review if you’re interested in seeing how it works!

So, overall, it’s really not that difficult to get white backgrounds on your eBay pictures. You just need to choose a method that works well for you.

I’d love to hear what you do to get white backgrounds on your eBay pictures. Share your tips in the comment below!