Changing the cropping strategy for square images

In this article, you'll learn why Crosslist sometimes adds black borders to your images when cross listing, and how can you disable this setting if you wish so.

Why do my cross listed images have black borders?

Some marketplaces, such as Poshmark and Depop, only allow square images (aspect ratio 1:1) in their listings, while other marketplaces, such as eBay, also allow rectangular images.

As a result, when cross listing from eBay to Poshmark or Depop, and your listing has rectangular images, then Crosslist will by default add black borders to the image to make it square.

Without this feature, Poshmark or Depop will automatically crop your image to fit their square image standard, which means that a portion of your image will be lost, as you can see in the example below.

eBay listing with an image in a rectangular format:

What will happen if you cross list this listing to Poshmark without using Crosslist:

As you can see, Poshmark has cropped the image to a square format, and the hanger and sleeves are now barely visible.

If you would list the same listing using Crosslist, no information would be lost, as black borders are added to make the image square:

Changing the cropping strategy

You can change your cropping settings in your Account Settings as follows:

For Poshmark and Depop:

• Crop excess to fit square: makes the image square without adding black borders (by zooming in)
• Add borders to fit square: makes the image square by adding black borders (no zooming in)

For Mercari:

• None: does not alter the image
• Crop excess to fit square: makes the image square without adding black borders (by zooming in)
• Add borders to fit square: makes the image square by adding black borders (no zooming in)

Crosslist allows users to adjust the settings for Mercari as well, as the square image preview on the Mercari website can reduce visibility (see the example above).

Other marketplaces display non-square images in their original format. As a consequence, this setting is not necessary for these marketplaces.