Your phone is already good enough. It’s the other rules that catch people.

The question people actually type is some version of “can I just use my phone?”

Yes. Not grudgingly, not as a compromise — by a distance. Here are the published floors, and here is what your phone hands you before you have thought about it.

The numbers, side by side

eBay asks for at least one photo 500 pixels on the longest side.

Google Merchant Center — what feeds Google Shopping — asks for at least 500 × 500, and recommends “around 1500x1500 pixels or above to ensure best performance in all listing formats”. Google has also announced that the 500 × 500 minimum applies to all products from 31 January 2027, so if anything the floor is firming up rather than moving.

Shopify accepts up to 5000 × 5000 or 25 megapixels at under 20MB, and says “for square product images, a size of 2048 x 2048 px usually displays best”.

Now the other side of the ledger. A 12-megapixel phone camera produces roughly 4,000 × 3,000 pixels. That is eight times the eBay floor on the long edge, six times Google’s, and comfortably inside everyone’s recommended band. Every phone sold in the last decade clears this. Most clear it twice over.

So when a listing photo goes wrong, it is essentially never the camera. It is one of three other things.

1. Anything written on the image

This is the big one, and it catches careful sellers rather than lazy ones.

eBay prohibits “watermarks of any type, including those used for ownership attributions”. Read that clause twice: marking your own photograph so other sellers cannot lift it is precisely the thing being banned.

Google is broader still. Product images may not carry “calls to action, for example, buy”, price information, barcodes, or “any overlay, for example, watermarks, brand names, logos”.

So the little “SALE” flash, the price corner, the shop name across the bottom — all of it is against the rules in both places, and all of it is added by people trying to do a better job.

2. Borders

Both platforms name added borders specifically. The tidy white frame that makes a set of photos look consistent is the wrong way to achieve consistency. Do it with the shot itself: same distance, same background, same crop.

3. Anything that isn’t the actual thing

eBay bans photos that don’t accurately represent the item, and stock photos outright for anything used, damaged or defective. Google requires the image to “accurately display the entire product” and show “the actual product being sold” with the correct variant, and rules out a placeholder, a “generic image, graphic, or illustration that is not the actual product image”, a logo used instead of a photo, and even a plain square of colour.

We went through the borrowed-photo version of this in detail the other week: can I use the manufacturer’s photos on eBay?

The pattern worth noticing

Line those three up and something becomes obvious. Not one of the rules is about photographic quality. There is no minimum sharpness, no lighting standard, no requirement to have used a proper camera. Every prohibition is about honesty and clutter: don’t write on it, don’t frame it, don’t show something other than the thing in the box.

Which means compliance is free and takes no equipment. Where the actual difference in a photograph comes from is unchanged and unglamorous: daylight from the side, a plain surface, the item filling the frame, and the marks and wear shown rather than hidden. We wrote that up properly in product photos without a studio.

What argues the other way

Clearing a floor is not the same as being good. These are minimums for acceptance, not standards for selling. A compliant photo can still be dim, cluttered and unappealing, and no platform will tell you so — buyers just scroll past.

Some categories genuinely defeat a phone. Anything highly reflective, jewellery, glass, small items needing real macro work. If that is your stock, a professional shoot is money well spent and I would not pretend otherwise.

And the rules move. Everything above was read on the platforms’ own pages this week; policies change without much announcement, so check before you rely on it for anything important.

One of those figures has since turned out to be less settled than it looks: Google’s page states the 500 × 500 minimum in the present tense and, a few lines above, announces it as new from 31 January 2027. We pulled that apart separately in the 500 × 500 rule and the sentence sitting next to it, along with a tested way to find undersized images in bulk.

The short version

Your phone clears every published requirement several times over. Take the watermark off, take the border off, show the real item, and you have satisfied the rules completely. Everything left after that is craft, not kit.

Sources, all read directly on 22 August 2026: eBay’s picture policy for the 500-pixel minimum and the prohibitions on watermarks, added borders, added text and photos that don’t represent the item; Google Merchant Center’s image requirements for the 500×500 minimum, the announcement that it applies to all products from 31 January 2027, the ~1500×1500 recommendation, the 16MB and 64-megapixel ceilings and the list of prohibited overlays; and Shopify’s product media documentation for its 5000×5000 / 25-megapixel / 20MB limits and the 2048×2048 recommendation. The 4,000×3,000 figure is simply what a 12-megapixel sensor produces at 4:3. Etsy and Amazon are deliberately absent: Etsy blocks automated access to its policy pages and Amazon’s sit behind a seller login, so I could not read either at source. Rather than repeat what other sites say those rules are, I have left them out — if you sell on those platforms, go and read their own pages.