387 How to get a better look at items for sale online

When you’re looking at items for sale online, sometimes the picture of the item can be kind of small. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see a nice big picture? Sometimes you can – here’s how.

Here’s an example.

I am constantly shopping online for used bikes. One of the places I check regularly is Facebook Marketplace. It seems like it’s much more popular now than Craigslist for selling used items (although Craigslist is still a great place to shop and I use it as well).

When you list an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace, you have the opportunity to upload several pictures of the item. When I’m looking at bikes, I obviously want to see a picture of the bike (or even better, several pictures).

So someone with a bike for sale takes a bunch of nice, high-resolution pictures so that potential buyers can see everything they need to see. But then Facebook steps in, and limits the size of the pictures. No matter how large the original picture is, it will still be displayed in a small space on the page. Like this:

And of course there is no option in the listing to “zoom in” or see the picture more closely. I’d like to see a closer picture of the chain, for example.

Here’s how to get a better picture:

Do a RIGHT click on the picture, and in the little menu that comes up, click on “Open image in new tab”. That will, of course, open a new tab in your browser.

And in that tab, the only thing you’ll see is the image. In most cases, it will be at a higher resolution. This is how close we can see the bike pictured above when I did this:

This same process often works with Craigslist, OfferUp and other online classified sites. In fact, it works on a lot of websites, even if you’re not looking at something being sold. Many times a website will reduce the resolution and/or dimensions of a displayed photo in order to save bandwidth and have the page load more quickly. But you can always try opening the image in a new tab and see if you can view it as a larger picture.