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.
