Etsy listing photo size: 2000 pixels and thumbnail crops

Etsy recommends listing photos at least 2000 pixels wide and 2000 pixels tall, and says your first listing photo should be at least 635 pixels on both sides to avoid showing up lower in searches. Make that first photo landscape or square, with space around the item, because Etsy crops thumbnails to square, portrait and landscape. If your photo of the item is smaller, Sume's Image Upscale 1.0 enlarges it by any factor from 1 to 4: a 1000-pixel photo at 2× is 2000 pixels.

Etsy's rules are quoted from its Help page Requirements and Best Practices for Images in Your Etsy Shop. The upscale request comes from the OpenAPI document behind the Sume API reference, and polling from Jobs and results. All were read on 2026-09-28.

What size should Etsy listing photos be?

Etsy gives one recommendation and one floor. Its rules for listing photos:

What shape should the first listing photo be?

Horizontal or square, so the center of the image survives the cropped thumbnail views. Etsy shows each listing in square, portrait and landscape thumbnails, and asks for enough border that all three crops keep the whole product.

• Shoot from further back than you think you need, with extra space around the item, and keep its most important part in the center.
• Etsy's thumbnail tips say to avoid square crops and upload horizontal images: a vertical photo loses more to the crop.
• Upload all the photos in one shape. The first photo sets the shape of the photos that follow.
• Use the thumbnail adjustment tool to preview and fine-tune each crop.

How do I make a small photo 2000 pixels?

Upscale it. The factor is 2000 ÷ the photo's shorter edge, and Image Upscale 1.0 takes any upscale_factor from 1 to 4. Send the photo's public HTTPS URL to POST /v1/image-upscale-1.0/upscale; the job runs async by default, so poll GET /v1/jobs/{id}/status until it's terminal, then read GET /v1/jobs/{id}/result.

• Rounding at fractional factors isn't documented, so check the result's size before you upload it. Upscale an image to an exact size covers the math.
• output_format defaults to png; ask for jpg and check the file size, because Etsy says images over 1 MB may not finish uploading on a slower connection.
• API pricing lists Image upscale at $0.20 per image, with no separate rate by factor, plus a 5.5% agent fee by default.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/image-upscale-1.0/upscale \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "image_url": "https://example.com/photos/mug-1000.jpg",
    "upscale_factor": 2,
    "output_format": "jpg"
  }'

What can't an upscale fix?

• A photo whose shorter edge is under 500 pixels needs more than 4×, so retake it or start from a larger original.
• Framing. An upscale keeps the shape and crop of your photo, so a tight shot still leaves no border for Etsy's thumbnail crops.
• Detail the camera never caught. Start from the sharpest photo of the item itself you have.
• The image must be at a public HTTPS URL; the request takes a URL, not file bytes.