A New Picture Hosting Service Is Coming Soon!
Just wanted to touch base about a new change that is coming up soon with eBay. In the last few weeks eBay has let on that Picture Manager is being retired.
Picture Manager is eBay’s picture hosting service, this service will be discontinued in August of 2009.
eBay are retiring Picture Manager so they can focus their resources on a single eBay picture platform, eBay Picture Services (EPS).
eBay believe this new change will allow them to deliver better pictures and also new state of the art picture features for your eBay listings at a competitive price, which sounds great for those that have been thinking about subscribing but haven’t because of the cost!
They are also adding a new way to upload pictures to eBay Picture Services. You can use the new “Copy Web Files” option to upload your picture directly from your 3rd party photo hosting site. eBay will then store your pictures on eBay and display them in your listings.
So when will Picture Manager be retired?
Sellers will no longer be able to create a new subscription or upgrade an existing subscription as of mid March, 2009.
So you may want to know what will happen to your Picture Manager pictures in your existing listings?
If you delete pictures stored in Picture Manager, they will be immediately removed from your listings and replaced by a standard eBay graphic indicating that you deleted the pictures.
If you unsubscribe from Picture Manager, pictures in your active listings will remain available for you to use in listings for 100 days from the date you unsubscribe.
When the 100 day period ends, pictures not used in recent listing and pictures used only in the description area of a listing will be permanently deleted.
When you use these pictures in listings, they will be set to expire automatically 90 days after the end of the listing.
If you manually delete your pictures, they will be deleted immediately, regardless of the length of your subscription.
What about if you have a Store? What will happen to your pictures on your Store custom pages?
If you used Picture Manger to upload your pictures to custom Store pages, those pictures will be maintained as long as you continue to use them.
You will still be able to manage your custom Store pages, but you will be using the eBay Picture Services uploader in your Store Builder instead of the Picture Manager uploader.
So if you are using Picture Manager to keep your pictures keep using it up until August where it then switch over to Picture Services.
You will need to migrate your photos to another hosting service either eBay’s new picture hosting service or a third party solution before the end of August.
Til next time, have a great selling weekend!
Matt & Amanda Clarkson
Bidding Buzz Ltd

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