Half the gear that leaves this shed gets sold before it ever leaves the shed, because Tony's a firm believer that if something's not being used, it's someone else's turn to use it. Old compressors, spare alternators, a genuinely excessive collection of socket sets bought twice because the first one went missing, trailer parts, the occasional car, all of it ends up photographed on the same bit of concrete out the back and listed on Marketplace or Gumtree by whoever's turn it is to deal with the photos that week.
The photo part used to be the annoying bit, not because taking the photos is hard, but because getting them into a usable state afterwards was a mess. Every phone these days takes photos in HEIC format by default if it's an iPhone, and half the marketplace sites and older forms still choke on that format or just refuse the upload outright. You'd think this would've sorted itself out by now given how long iPhones have shot HEIC, but plenty of listing sites are still stuck expecting a plain JPG.
The fix that's stuck around in our routine is the HEIC to JPG converter at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/heic-to-jpg-converter.php. Drop the photos in, get JPGs out, done, no email-to-yourself trick, no changing camera settings on the phone and hoping you remember to change them back before the next family photo, no installing an app just for this one job. It runs in the browser, which matters when you're doing this from whatever laptop happens to be free in the house, not always your own.
Once the format's sorted, file size is the next problem, especially for anything going into a form with an upload limit or a site that takes forever to load ten photos at full resolution. Modern phone cameras take enormous photos for what's ultimately going to be viewed on someone's phone screen deciding whether to message you about a secondhand compressor. We run everything through the image compressor at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/image-compressor.php before uploading anywhere, which knocks the file size down without turning the photo to mush, so listings load fast and don't get stuck on a slow connection or bounce off an upload limit on some council or trade site that still caps things at 2MB per file for reasons nobody's ever explained to us.
The other conversions that come up more than you'd expect are PNG to WebP and back again. WebP's become the standard a lot of websites want now because it's smaller for the same quality, but plenty of older tools, some marketplace platforms, and certain forms still only accept PNG or JPG and choke on WebP entirely. Rather than remembering which platform wants which format, we just convert on the fly with the png-to-webp converter at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/png-to-webp-converter.php and the webp-to-png converter at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/webp-to-png-converter.php depending on which direction we need to go that day. It's a two-minute job that used to mean opening an actual image editor for what's genuinely a trivial task.
A few things we've learned about taking photos that sell things faster, since we're on the topic. Natural light beats the workshop fluoro tubes every time, anything we're selling gets dragged out to the driveway rather than photographed under the shed lights, which give everything a slightly sick yellow-green cast that makes even a good tool look suspicious in a photo. Multiple angles matter more than one "hero shot," particularly for anything mechanical where buyers want to see wear, connectors, and condition before driving out to look at it in person, which saves everyone a wasted trip when the photos already answered their questions. And a size reference: a tape measure in frame, or a common object next to the item: heads off half the "how big is it actually" messages before they get sent.
Sideways and upside-down photos are another small annoyance that crops up more than you'd think, usually from a phone that decided the orientation sensor knew better than whoever was holding it, or a photo taken lying on its side to get under a car or trailer for an undercarriage shot. Rather than fighting with a phone's own editing tools, which vary wildly between devices and sometimes strip the fix when the file's exported, we straighten these up in the browser before they ever get near a listing, so nobody's tilting their head sideways trying to work out if that's rust or just a dodgy camera angle.
Old paperwork photos are the other unexpected use for this same set of tools. Selling anything that came with an original manual, warranty card, or service history means photographing that paperwork too, and phone cameras handle glossy or slightly curled paper badly, glare, odd colour casts, files that are enormous for what's ultimately a page of text someone just wants to read. Compressing those down the same way as the item photos keeps the whole listing quick to load, and a couple of the tools handle grayscale conversion nicely for paperwork shots where colour was never doing anything useful anyway, just adding file size for no benefit to the buyer trying to read a service history.
None of this is complicated technology, and that's kind of the point. These are two-minute jobs done in a browser tab between doing the actual work of cleaning up, testing, and pricing whatever's being sold, not a whole workflow requiring software installs or subscriptions for something you're doing a few times a month. The time saved adds up though, what used to be a fifteen-minute fight with formats and file sizes before a listing could even go up is now done before the kettle's boiled, and we get back to the actual job, which is moving gear on rather than fighting with photo formats.
Doing listings properly, with clear photos in the right format at a sensible file size, also just gets better responses. People scroll past blurry, oversized, or broken-format photos without a second thought, but a clean set of well-lit photos that actually load quickly gets messages within the hour more often than not. Worth the two minutes, every time.
The photo part used to be the annoying bit, not because taking the photos is hard, but because getting them into a usable state afterwards was a mess. Every phone these days takes photos in HEIC format by default if it's an iPhone, and half the marketplace sites and older forms still choke on that format or just refuse the upload outright. You'd think this would've sorted itself out by now given how long iPhones have shot HEIC, but plenty of listing sites are still stuck expecting a plain JPG.
The fix that's stuck around in our routine is the HEIC to JPG converter at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/heic-to-jpg-converter.php. Drop the photos in, get JPGs out, done, no email-to-yourself trick, no changing camera settings on the phone and hoping you remember to change them back before the next family photo, no installing an app just for this one job. It runs in the browser, which matters when you're doing this from whatever laptop happens to be free in the house, not always your own.
Once the format's sorted, file size is the next problem, especially for anything going into a form with an upload limit or a site that takes forever to load ten photos at full resolution. Modern phone cameras take enormous photos for what's ultimately going to be viewed on someone's phone screen deciding whether to message you about a secondhand compressor. We run everything through the image compressor at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/image-compressor.php before uploading anywhere, which knocks the file size down without turning the photo to mush, so listings load fast and don't get stuck on a slow connection or bounce off an upload limit on some council or trade site that still caps things at 2MB per file for reasons nobody's ever explained to us.
The other conversions that come up more than you'd expect are PNG to WebP and back again. WebP's become the standard a lot of websites want now because it's smaller for the same quality, but plenty of older tools, some marketplace platforms, and certain forms still only accept PNG or JPG and choke on WebP entirely. Rather than remembering which platform wants which format, we just convert on the fly with the png-to-webp converter at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/png-to-webp-converter.php and the webp-to-png converter at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/webp-to-png-converter.php depending on which direction we need to go that day. It's a two-minute job that used to mean opening an actual image editor for what's genuinely a trivial task.
A few things we've learned about taking photos that sell things faster, since we're on the topic. Natural light beats the workshop fluoro tubes every time, anything we're selling gets dragged out to the driveway rather than photographed under the shed lights, which give everything a slightly sick yellow-green cast that makes even a good tool look suspicious in a photo. Multiple angles matter more than one "hero shot," particularly for anything mechanical where buyers want to see wear, connectors, and condition before driving out to look at it in person, which saves everyone a wasted trip when the photos already answered their questions. And a size reference: a tape measure in frame, or a common object next to the item: heads off half the "how big is it actually" messages before they get sent.
Sideways and upside-down photos are another small annoyance that crops up more than you'd think, usually from a phone that decided the orientation sensor knew better than whoever was holding it, or a photo taken lying on its side to get under a car or trailer for an undercarriage shot. Rather than fighting with a phone's own editing tools, which vary wildly between devices and sometimes strip the fix when the file's exported, we straighten these up in the browser before they ever get near a listing, so nobody's tilting their head sideways trying to work out if that's rust or just a dodgy camera angle.
Old paperwork photos are the other unexpected use for this same set of tools. Selling anything that came with an original manual, warranty card, or service history means photographing that paperwork too, and phone cameras handle glossy or slightly curled paper badly, glare, odd colour casts, files that are enormous for what's ultimately a page of text someone just wants to read. Compressing those down the same way as the item photos keeps the whole listing quick to load, and a couple of the tools handle grayscale conversion nicely for paperwork shots where colour was never doing anything useful anyway, just adding file size for no benefit to the buyer trying to read a service history.
None of this is complicated technology, and that's kind of the point. These are two-minute jobs done in a browser tab between doing the actual work of cleaning up, testing, and pricing whatever's being sold, not a whole workflow requiring software installs or subscriptions for something you're doing a few times a month. The time saved adds up though, what used to be a fifteen-minute fight with formats and file sizes before a listing could even go up is now done before the kettle's boiled, and we get back to the actual job, which is moving gear on rather than fighting with photo formats.
Doing listings properly, with clear photos in the right format at a sensible file size, also just gets better responses. People scroll past blurry, oversized, or broken-format photos without a second thought, but a clean set of well-lit photos that actually load quickly gets messages within the hour more often than not. Worth the two minutes, every time.
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