If you've bought or sold on eBay (and odds are you have, with well over 200 million users worldwide), you know the importance of good pictures to making a sale and getting the best price. If you're a buyer, you want to see lots of good photos of what you're getting, and the sellers who provide them have a big edge over those who don't.

While eBay has its own image hosting service, the pictures are limited in size and have to fit in a certain area. They are often frustratingly small.

But there's a better way to display your eBay photos, with Roxio PhotoShow. Using PhotoShow, you can create an instant slideshow of any number of photos you like, and then automatically generate a snippet of HTML code you can embed in your eBay ad. The first slide in your show will then be displayed in the ad, and readers can click to view the whole thing. Shows can be up to 466x375 pixels, and can include all kinds of special effects, even music and voice narration.

To try out the process, my multi-talented colleague Carrie Scott created an ad for a pair of jeans she wanted to sell, following these steps:
1. Create a PhotoShow (in either the desktop or Web-based versions)
2. Upload the show to PhotoShow.com:





3. “Share” the show and choose “Publish” from the drop-down menu:





4. Copy the html code that you’re provided
5. Drop the html code into your eBay listing, within the “description” field
6. and Voila!





Some tips for creating great eBay slideshows:

> Create and save a "template" slideshow that you can use as the base for new ads. Tweak things like the frame, transitions and any background music.
> Keep things simple, and zoom in close on the subject of your photos. Use the PhotoShow editing tools to fix and crop photos as needed.

Also note that while this article focuses on using PhotoShow for eBay ads, the same process works for embedding slideshows in any Web page or blog entry. PhotoShow even has handy presets for publishing to MySpace, FaceBook, Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, and many other sites.