You’ve successfully added your photos to a listing, pressed “Publish”, and everything looked fine…. until it didn’t.
Suddenly your gallery image becomes a grey box, your description photos fail to load, or your thumbnail looks strangely corrupted on some devices but not others.
If your images uploaded correctly and your links were fully accepted by eBay, yet they don’t display after publishing, this guide explains the real technical reasons why this happens,… and how sellers can prevent it.
Inside this article
1. Broken Image Icons After Publishing
Sometimes, eBay displays a generic broken-image placeholder even though the file was valid at the moment of upload.
This usually happens due to:
▶️ Initial image fetch failures
After publishing, eBay may re-fetch externally hosted images for validation or rendering. If the image host responds slowly, rate-limits requests, or temporarily errors, the image may appear broken, even though it previously worked.
▶️ Slow or blocked image responses
Image hosts with aggressive firewall rules, bot protection, or slow response times can cause eBay to give up fetching the image and display a broken placeholder instead of retrying.
▶️ Invalid or inconsistent HTTP headers
Incorrect Content-Type, inconsistent ETag, broken range requests, or restrictive cache headers can prevent eBay or browsers from rendering the image reliably.
How to fix it
- Host images on a platform optimized for marketplace hotlinking (fast CDN, no rate limiting for marketplace crawlers, stable URLs, original image formats, predictable HTTP headers).
- Make sure your server consistently returns 200 OK, correct
Content-Type, and no forced redirects. - Avoid hosting images on personal websites or dynamic platforms that often throttle traffic, block bots, or time out under bulk requests.
2. Missing Gallery Photos (Main Image Not Loaded)
A listing may publish correctly but the main gallery photo fails to appear for some users.
Common causes include:
▶️ Photo ingestion/processing delay
eBay may still be processing the photo (especially right after publish or after edits), leading to temporary missing gallery images on some devices/regions.
▶️ External image fetch instability (if you upload via flat file/API with image URLs)
If eBay’s fetch encounters timeouts, redirects, 403/429 rate limits, wrong Content-Type, or intermittent 5xx responses, the gallery photo may fail to ingest reliably.
▶️ Regional caching / client-side issues
Some users may hit a stale cache, blocked requests (privacy tools, aggressive ad blockers), or app/web differences that make images appear missing temporarily.
How to fix it
- If using external image URLs for ingestion: ensure the host returns fast, consistent 200 OK, correct
Content-Type(image/jpeg,image/png), no hotlink blocking, no short-lived URLs, and avoid flaky redirects. - Wait and re-check shortly after publishing/edits; if it’s an eBay processing/cache issue, it often resolves.
- Test in different browsers/networks (mobile data vs Wi-Fi) and (optionally) different regions via VPN to confirm whether it’s client/cache related.
3. Corrupted or Blurry Thumbnails
Sometimes the full-size image loads fine, but the thumbnail looks corrupted, overly pixelated, or shows strange color artifacts.
This usually indicates:
▶️ Double-compression issues
If your host already applies aggressive compression, eBay may re-compress the already degraded image when generating thumbnails… resulting in visible distortions.
▶️ Problematic metadata or orientation handling
Thumbnail generators may mis-handle images that rely on EXIF orientation flags, contain embedded previews, or include unnecessary metadata segments.
How to fix it
- Use standard, baseline JPEGs with common chroma subsampling (4:2:0).
- Avoid aggressive pre-compression before upload.
- Strip unnecessary EXIF data and physically apply orientation (don’t rely on orientation flags alone).
- Use an image host that normalizes and validates JPEGs before eBay ingestion to reduce thumbnail corruption risks.
Platforms like Img.vision automatically normalize your JPEGs before eBay processes them, reducing corruption risks.
4. Cross-Browser Inconsistencies (Chrome vs Safari vs Firefox)
Your images may look perfect in Chrome but broken or missing in Safari… or vice-versa.
This is usually caused by differences in how browsers negotiate formats and enforce standards, not by random browser bugs.
Typical reasons:
▶️ Strict vs tolerant image decoding
Browsers differ slightly in how strictly they parse image files. Images with malformed JPEG encoding, unusual metadata, or incomplete headers may render in one browser but fail in another.
▶️ Automatic format switching by the image host
Some CDNs deliver different image formats (WebP, AVIF, JPEG XL) depending on browser support. Not all eBay rendering and ingestion paths support these formats consistently, leading to browser-specific failures.
How to fix it
- Disable automatic format negotiation (eg. delivering JPG as WebP), unless you are certain the target platform supports it.
- Serve identical image bytes regardless of browser.
- Test images across Blink (Chrome), WebKit (Safari), and Gecko (Firefox).
5. JPEG Rendering Issues That Cause Photos to “Disappear“
In rare cases, an image may be accepted by eBay but fail to render correctly in certain browsers. When this happens, the failure is often silent and can appear as:
- blank image areas
- partially loaded photos
- infinite loading spinners
- images missing from the item description
This usually occurs when the JPEG file itself is malformed or inconsistently encoded.
JPEGs typically fail due to:
▶️ Problematic progressive scans
Multi-scan JPEGs with non-standard segment markers can decode fine on desktop Chrome but fail on older iOS Safari.
▶️ Invalid Huffman tables
Some camera apps or AI background-removal tools output JPEGs with broken or non-standard Huffman segments. eBay accepts the file, but the browser chokes on decoding.
▶️ Corrupt EOI marker
If the “end of image” marker is missing or truncated, some browsers display the image partially while others hide it completely.
How to fix it
- Re-export images through a stable encoder (Photoshop, ImageMagick, etc.).
- Avoid overly aggressive optimization tools with experimental modes.
- Always serve a clean, baseline JPEG for eBay.
6. How to Ensure Your eBay Images Display Reliably Every Time
To guarantee your photos always show correctly after publishing, focus on these fundamentals:
✅ Host on a stable CDN designed for marketplace ingestion
Marketplaces fetch images in bulk and expect fast, consistent responses. A CDN optimized for this avoids header variability, ingestion blocking, and slow first-byte responses that can cause images to fail after publishing.
✅ Serve clean, baseline JPEGs
Stick to predictable JPEG structures. No exotic formats, no experimental compression modes.
✅ Maintain consistent headers
Always return:
200 OKContent-Type: image/jpeg- A stable
Cache-Controlpolicy - Redirect-free URLs
✅ Avoid per-request image transformations
Marketplaces fetch images in bulk and expect consistent responses. Avoid on-the-fly resizing, or expiring URLs. Always serve fully cached, static image files.
✅ Test your listing immediately after publishing
View the listing in:
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Safari
- Mobile Safari (real device)
- incognito/private mode
If all versions display reliably, the listing is stable.
Final Takeaway
When images don’t appear after an eBay listing is published, even though they uploaded successfully, the issue is most commonly related to image delivery and rendering, such as CDN behavior, caching, or image encoding.
Using a stable, marketplace-optimized image host and serving clean, standards-compliant JPEGs dramatically reduces the chances of photos disappearing, failing to load, or rendering incorrectly on eBay.
