The Better to See You With! (or: Etsy Image Sizes and Cropping)

Etsy Image Size Math

EDIT: Etsy is now pestering folks to have a minimum width of 1500 for the zoom feature. My items are small enough that a larger picture wouldn’t be useful to the buyer, but if you need the room, use 1500×1191 or 3000×2382.

I’ve Googled my heart out, but I can’t find anywhere that shows what the proper sizes are for Etsy listing product photos nor how it crops/resizes things for each of the different thumbnails that it makes.

…so time to experiment! ๐Ÿ˜€

This post covers the sizes of the gallery (store and search) images, the listing images, and the ‘zoom to enhance’ images. I used an image with cascading rectangles to figure out the resizing and cropping that happens to the too large and too small images.

So… onwards!

Listing Images

Etsy Gallery Image Size - Test Image for Scale and Cropping 570x453
TL;DR – 1024×813 will resize to this cleanly

These images are a max of 570 pixels wide and 3000 pixels tall.

The display height for all images is set by the largest photo you upload. All smaller photos will have grey bars across the top and bottom of the image as ‘filler’. If your image is smaller than 570 pixels wide it will will also have grey bars along the sides.

I resized my test image several times trying to find the max upload size, but I actually started having issues with my image editor before I had problems with the upload! The largest image it allowed me to upload was 9000 x 9000, which it promptly resized down to the max height… but still, that’s insane.

There is also no obvious ‘too small’ limit. Etsy will warn you about images under 750 pixels wide, but allows you to upload things much smaller. I only went down to 100×100 as I couldn’t imagine anyone trying something smaller.

Zoom Images

Etsy Image Testing Scale Resize 1024 813 text
TL;DR – Upload images this size!

These images are a max of 1024 pixels wide and 3000 pixels tall.

The display size here is calculated per photo, so you won’t see the gray bars here (although there is a gray border added to the images). The image will appear actual size if it is smaller than the max thresholds.

For smaller screens, like a cellphone the image will be initially shrunk to the width of the screen, but it allows zooming to the full image size.

Gallery Images (Store and Search)

Etsy Image Testing Scale Resize 340 270 text
TL;DR – 1024×813 will resize to this cleanly

These are the product images that most folks will see first, so they are the most important for catching people’s eyes. Etsy will have you crop the images to fit a size of 340×270, but a lot of the time the website will display it smaller than this size. It seems to depend on the user’s screen size for how they actually appear.

The image that Etsy has you crop from is a resized version of your actual image. It looks like it resizes it to 340 pixels wide and then allows you to zoom in or move the crop area up or down (if the image is tall enough).

Interestingly this article on the Etsy website claims that the size are as follows:

  • Dimensions for thumbnails = 75 x 75 pixels (I cannot find a 75×75 image anywhere on Etsy other than in your shop management pages?)
  • Dimensions for gallery images = 170 x 135 pixels or 155 x 125 pixels  (50% and %46 of the 340×270 image)

And Now MATH! ๐Ÿ˜€

Etsy Listing Photo Ratio Cropping
Looks like I need to retake this one…

So we have images that need to look good in 340×270 but must also look good at 570x??? and 1024x???

(A quick THANK YOU shout out to the Aspect Ratio Calculator by Andrew Hedges that I used to get the following numbers!)

If we just straight up scale up, 340×270 turns into 570×453 and 1024×813. A 4:3 ratio at 1024 would be 1024×768, so the 813 is pretty close to what you can get with one of the preset ratio crop features in some image editing programs.

My digital camera like to take photos at 5248ร—2952.  I would need to crop the width down to 3717×2952 to fit the Etsy ratio, which means I need to aim for ‘dead’ space on either side of the photographs when I take them.

As you can see by the example to the right… I need to go retake some photos. *facepalm*

Anywho, I hope this is helpful to other folks out there Googling the web for answers! ๐Ÿ˜€

*dashes off*



One response to “The Better to See You With! (or: Etsy Image Sizes and Cropping)”

  1. Sujan Avatar

    I would like to recommend your post. Here you described nicely.

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