Shooting clothes on a phone, sharp enough to actually use

Phones people already carry resolve more than enough detail for this job. What separates two photos is usually not the hardware but two things that cost nothing: where the light comes from, and how much of the frame the product fills. Get those wrong and a newer phone will not rescue them.

• A window that lets light in. Use it as your main light instead of the lamps indoors, and shoot during the day without switching anything on.

• A plain wall or a plain sheet for the background. Light neutral colours work with almost any garment, but avoid a colour close to the garment's own — the edges will melt into the background.

• A hanger, or any flat clear surface. If the garment does not hang well, lay it flat instead.

• An iron or a spray bottle of water for the creases. Fold marks from the packaging make an item look like it is not ready to sell.

Flash fires from the same place as the lens, so you get a bright hotspot in the middle of the garment, a hard shadow beside it, and colour that goes pale exactly where the light landed. Ceiling lamps sit above your head, so they drop shadows under the collar and under the hem, which makes the shape hard to read. The best light you can get without spending anything is a window, with the light arriving from the side of the item or from in front of it.

• Put the window to the side or in front of the item, never behind it. Backlight makes the camera darken the whole frame, and the product comes out dim.

• Turn the flash off, and the room lights too if you can. Mixing two kinds of light shifts the garment's colour.

• If the side away from the window is too dark, stand a sheet of white paper or white cloth there. It bounces light back and lifts the shadow.

• The thing to avoid is a hard shadow lying across the garment. If the shadow has a crisp edge, move out of the direct beam or draw a thin curtain across the window.

• Collar, sleeves and hem all visible in one frame. Anything folded out of sight is a part nobody can judge the shape of.

• Iron or spray the creases out first, especially the centre fold that comes from being packed.

• Stand the collar up instead of letting it fold onto itself, and pull both shoulder seams straight.

• Lay the sleeves out at their true length. Do not roll them up unless that is how you are selling it.

• If the garment carries a print or lettering, turn that panel square to the camera and keep creases from running across it.

• Files forwarded through a chat app. Those apps compress the file on the way, so what reached you is not the file the sender took.

• Screenshots. You get screen resolution and nothing more, compressed a second time on top of that.

• Photos cropped down to a small corner. Cropping throws pixels away, and enlarging afterwards does not bring the detail back.

• The fix for all three is the same: go back to the original file on the device that took it, if you still can.

• The shorter side must be at least 480 pixels. Below that the upload is refused.

• At least 1024 pixels is recommended. Below that it still uploads, but you get a visible warning.

• Around 1280 pixels and up is what has been proven to work best.

• The check looks at the shorter side, not the longer one, because a long thin image still carries too little product detail.

• JPEG, PNG and WebP are accepted, up to 15 MB per file.

Shooting it yourself makes the most sense when only a few items come in and you have the time to set up a table and wait for the light. Everything on this page can be done at home without spending anything. What stops it being worth it is not the price — it is the hours. New stock every week means ironing, arranging the light, staging, shooting, sorting and finishing, for every item and again the next week. At that point the approach that gives back the most time is to shoot one photo per item, as sharp as you can manage, and let the system build the model shots, the scene changes and the shaped no-person shot from that single file. Either way, a good source photo is still the part you have to do yourself.