Fast Photos is a photo editor specifically designed for editing auction and online commerce photos. It is a Windows desktop application that combines thumbnail browsing, streamlined editing and FTP file upload into one integrated tool. For more detailed info see our Feature Summary page. Or take a look at the Screen Shots. Or take a look at Better Auction Photos Faster.
People starting out with online auctions and want help getting their photos edited and ready to use in auctions easily. Or people who do a lot of auctions and want to save time prepping their photos.
Photo quality matters most when you have one-of-a-kind items like collectibles, antiques, clothes, or jewelry where the photo must sell the item.
Auction sellers need special features in an image editor. They need to be able to produce a lot of great looking images quickly. Auctions can have more than one image. And a busy auction seller could be running 100 or more auctions a week. That adds up to potentially editing hundreds of images at a time. Each image must be sized to fit in an auction description, optimized to load quickly, watermarked to show the seller's name, and possibly have a Gallery Thumbnail created. Then these images need to be uploaded to the web for use in the auction.
For many auction items your photo is the primary sales tool -- there is no other way for the buyer to really know what you are selling. So the photo quality must be excellent or you will lose sales.
Fast Photos has the tools to speed through all these tasks quickly and easily.
There are many fine image editors available. Photoshop is the industry standard -- for professional artists or photographers. But only Fast Photos includes all the tools you need integrated into one package. No other tool has the same focus on streamlining the auction photo preparation process, including a built-in FTP upload, one click creation of Gallery thumbnails, and one click automated picture editing, among other features. With Fast Photos you spend more of your valuable time doing auctions, not learning and using tools that aren't designed for this purpose.
Please see the item above. Regardless of the dollar cost of the package(s) you use, your time has value. And Fast Photos will save you time. Just count mouse clicks and you will see!
Preparing even one photo for an auction involves many different steps: cropping, resizing, enhancing, JPEG compression, and upload to an image hosting site. Doing all these steps takes valuable time. Fast Photos has integrated all these workflow steps and made special editing tools that get the essential work done with as few steps as possible.
With the Automation tool you can do many edit operations with one click. What would take several minutes in a normal image editor takes seconds in Fast Photos.
You get an email with a registration key that unlocks the time limitation of the trial version. You also get free upgrades for the next set of minor releases.
This command takes your image, resizes it to fit in a Gallery Thumbnail, and centers it in a square image with a white background. All with one mouse click. You then upload the image to eBay where eBay resizes the image to 96 by 96 pixels. We have found that starting out with a larger image makes a better looking thumbnail after eBay is done with it.
The Automation command gives you up to 5 tasks or commands that you can perform with one mouse click. Each commmand can be customized and saved as a default. The commands are Auto Enhance, Resize, Sharpen, Add Text (watermark text), and Add Border (solid or drop shadow).
Yes you can resize to one of three fixed sizes or set up a custom size. This can be used for creating thumbnails. Fast Photos uses a resize technique that minimizes quality loss and produces the best possible looking results.
JPEG is by far the most useful format for auction photos because it compresses image file size while preserving image quality. Small file sizes make for fast-loading images. This is so important for auction photos that Fast Photos has a special feature to preview JPEG compression quality visually. This way you can see exactly how your image will look at a given compression or quality level and see its resulting file size.
Yes you can do all of these quickly in one simple tool. And you can see the results of your changes in real time as you watch, no special 'preview' mode or pop-up dialogs. If you don't like your changes you can always use the Undo command and step back to an earlier version.
Yes. You edit and upload your images normally. Then you can get the image URL's from the Fast Photos history log and put them in your auction descriptions.
All images that appear in online auctions must be stored, or hosted, on a web server somewhere. Then you link to these images from your auction descriptions. The web server could be on eBay Picture Services, on your own ISP, or on a specialized image hosting service. Most ISP accounts give you free storage that you can use for web pages or images. Image hosting services are web servers that specialize in handling image files.
Yes. You can use Fast Photos to edit your photos the way you want, then upload them to eBay Picture Services. Make sure to use minimal JPEG compression (highest Quality setting) when you save them with Fast Photos, since Picture Services will recompress them with JPEG after you upload them.
Yes. Almost all ISP's (Internet Service Providers) provide you with disk space where you can upload files using FTP. You need to contact them to find out how to login to your FTP account, then use that as your Fast Photos Publish account.
Yes you can. AOL gives you 2 megabytes of disk space per screen name that you can upload pictures to. Instructions are provided in the Fast Photos help file.
1) You will probably save on the Picture Services fees! 2) You will get much better image quality. When you use eBay Picture Services, eBay takes your images and does a couple of things to them. First it resizes them so they are at most 400 pixels wide. Then they compress the image into a JPEG format file (.jpg). Both of these steps can cause a perfectly sharp image to get fuzzy if you are not careful to preserve quality, and for some reason eBay is not careful. The biggest problem is the JPEG compression step. JPEG is what is called a 'lossy' compression format, where you lose more quality the more you compress. And eBay compresses a lot!
When you host the images elsewhere make sure the service does not recompress or otherwise process your images in any way. Then if you use Fast Photos to editing the images, what you see is what you will get -- the best possible quality.
Yes. If your hosting service supports FTP upload you can upload directly. Otherwise you can still edit your images with Fast Photos and use the upload page provided by your service.
