Topic: Selling Topics

How Do I Get a Picture Shown in the Category Showcase?

The category showcase features high quality pictures from three randomly chosen booths of premiere (or, for a time being, plus) subscribing booths (read more about Bonanzle memberships). Below we'll describe how you can submit pictures, and how you can get your pictures approved to be shown in the category showcase.

How to Submit a Picture

1. Subscribe to Bonanzle, if you haven't already. Eventually you'll need to be a premiere member, but for the first few months of the Category Showcase, plus members are also eligible to featured in the Category Showcase.
2. Visit your booth's Advanced Options (Sell -> Advanced Options tab).
3. Near the bottom of the screen is a section labeled "Upload Category Showcase Images". Click the link to "Upload Category Showcase image."
4. Upload up to three pictures, choosing the category that each picture belongs in.

What Happens Next?

Next, our crack team of art professionals (<-- help documentation saracasm) will review your image submission to see if it meets the criteria for being included in the Category Showcase.

Because the Category Showcase pictures are the headlining images representing all of a category to a potential buyer, we have to be extremely choosy about which pictures are included in the Category Showcase. But you don't have to be a professional photographer to be included. Here is how you can take a picture that gets featured in the Category Showcase:

• Make sure the picture looks crystal clear after you upload it. The most common reason that showcase images are not chosen is that they are grainy or otherwise not sharp and in focus. Often times, pictures get taken, resized, and converted before they're finally uploaded. Any of these steps can add "static" to your picture. To avoid this, save your image at the highest resolution possible, and upload the picture in the correct dimensions (345 pixels high by 230 pixels wide) so that our image cropper doesn't introduce graininess when it crops your image. Note that your image must be 6 megabytes or less when you upload it.
• Mind the lighting. Under non-ideal lighting conditions, images can have a blue, green, or red hue to them. Ensure that your picture is taken with proper lighting to avoid ambient hues to the picture. Bright light makes almost any photo subject look more full of life.
• Keep it simple. The most provocative pictures tend to be pictures that feature a single subject, with a mundane or hazy background. "Busy" pictures, that is, pictures that have background clutter, are more tiring for a buyer's eyes to try to process. For best results, ensure that background noise/clutter is minimized in your picture.
• The less generic, the better. Pictures of flowers, sunsets, stock pictures, and some jewelry pictures are susceptible to be excluded because they are less likely to draw in a buyer (though we do not challenge the strong innate beauty of both sunsets and flowers. They're great). This isn't to say that flowers and sunsets are automatically excluded, but pictures that show a buyer something interesting they haven't seen before are far more likely to get high marks.

In the future, we hope to setup a system by which users can help other users in giving comments to help improve pictures. For the time being, though, you can email us at support if you can't figure out why your pictures might not currently meet the requirements above.

Within a week of uploading your category showcase image, if you revisit your booth advanced options you will be able to see results about the liklihood of your picture being used in the image showcase. A rating of "low" means you image is unlikely to be shown in the Category Showcase. You can help your cause if you have images to submit for categories that have less images in them. Categories like "Collectibles" and "Jewelry" have a very high quality bar due to the number of submissions. Check current image category counts here).

My Pictures Keep Getting Rated Low, I'm Gonna Freak!

Umm, that's not exactly a question, but let's pretend like it was. We understand that many small business people are not artists, and as such, it can be difficult to take a picture that nails the three requirements listed above. Not having a high quality digital camera also makes it a real challenge to get uploaded pictures approved.

We apologize that we are not able to accept all image submissions, but we believe there are pictures in almost every booth that could make for a suitable Category Showcase picture. It's just a matter of finding the right one. For this particular corner of the site, we need the pictures to meet an extremely high bar of quality to surprise and impress buyers.

Even if your pictures are not chosen to be in the Category Showcase, if you're a member, your booth items are still likely to be featured on the home page, on the Buy page (both as the "featured booth" and in the "featured items" sections), and your Bonanza items will still be shown all over the place.

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