Depop Photo Size Guide 2026: Exact Specs and Square Crops
Depop shows every listing photo as a square. Get the exact specs, the four-photo strategy, and measured export sizes that keep your item inside the crop.
Contents
The working Depop photo size is a 1280×1280 square. A listing holds up to four photos and one video, and Depop’s own documentation never publishes a pixel requirement; 1280 is simply where the third-party guides converge. Whatever you upload gets shown in a 1:1 frame, so the real job is composing with the item far enough inside the shot that the square crop can’t reach it.
The square itself is free. iPhone Photos has a Square preset in the crop tool, and Apple’s guide notes the tool keeps your original aspect ratio until you tap the lock icon to change it. The catch is control: Photos crops one image at a time and saves at whatever resolution falls out of the edit, with no field where you type 1280 and get 1280.
When the pixels have to be exact, the browser-based crop image tool takes a 1:1 preset plus typed dimensions instead of an eyeballed slider. The export comes out at the size you asked for, which matters once you start batching a whole rail of clothes.
Depop photo specs at a glance
The short version first, with an honest note on which numbers are official and which are not.
| Spec | Value | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Photos per listing | Up to 4 | Depop Help Centre |
| Videos per listing | 1 | Depop Help Centre |
| Video length | Trim to 5–15 seconds | Depop’s listing-video guide |
| Display shape | Square, 1:1 | The app itself; every tool guide agrees |
| Recommended export | 1280×1280 px | Third-party convergence, not official |
| Official pixel spec | Not published | Depop docs state counts, never pixels |
| Video audio | Muted on upload | Depop’s listing-video guide |
That third column is where most guides get sloppy. Depop’s help centre is precise about counts: add up to four photos and one video, describe the item, post. The seller handbook repeats the photo advice with statistics attached. Neither document names a resolution. The 1280×1280 figure comes from tool vendors; Photoroom’s Depop guide calls it the ideal dimension, and resizer sites market the same number. Treat it as a sane target rather than a rule, because a 1080×1080 export left over from an Instagram workflow won’t sink a listing.
What the square crop costs you
A camera shoots rectangles and Depop shows squares, and the difference is pixels you already paid for. Crop a 3:2 camera frame to 1:1 and you keep 66.7% of the image; a full third is gone. A 4:3 phone photo gives up a quarter. That arithmetic is why boots vanish from full-body shots and why a sleeve gets clipped off a flat lay: the missing pixels have to come from somewhere, and they come from the edges.
Shoot loose. The crop can only take what you left near the border.
In practice that means centering the garment with visible margin on all four sides, then checking the shot in a square preview before upload rather than after. It’s the same habit I lean on for Etsy listing photos, where the first image also sets the geometry of everything that follows. The marketplaces differ; the discipline stays the same.
A browser prep pipeline, with measured numbers
I ran a local check rather than trust the guides. The starting file was a 6000×4000 JPEG straight from a camera, weighing 2.81 MB. Center-cropped to a square and exported at JPEG quality 85, it landed like this:
| Export size | File weight |
|---|---|
| 1280×1280 | 116 KB |
| 1080×1080 | 90 KB |
| 640×640 | 44 KB |
The spread tells you two things. First, resolution moves the bytes far more than the quality slider does; the 2.81 MB original and the 116 KB export are the same picture at the same quality setting, just fewer pixels. Second, the gap between 1080 and 1280 is 26 KB (which is nothing on any connection), so export at the bigger size and stop thinking about it.
The pipeline itself is three moves:
- Crop to the square first, while every pixel is still there to choose from.
- Resize to exact pixels only after the crop, so the resample happens once, not twice.
- If the file still feels heavy, run it through Araluma Compress with the live preview and stop at the point where texture starts to smear.
Order matters more than tooling here. Resize a rectangle and then crop it, and you throw away resolution you could have kept; crop first and the resize works from the densest version of the frame. And if some upload form ever hands you a hard byte ceiling instead of a dimension, that is a different problem, one I broke down in the guide to compress to 200 KB.
Four photo slots, one job each
Depop’s own numbers argue against the one-photo listing. The seller handbook says using all four photos raises the chance of selling by up to 20%, and its suggested split is the one I’d give anyway: front, back, brand or label detail, and the item worn. The same handbook is blunter about staging, claiming flat lays make an item up to 60% more likely to sell than hanger shots. Model shots, it adds, raise your odds of landing on the Explore page.
Lighting gets specific treatment in Depop’s photo guidance: shoot near a window, prefer a cloudy day outdoors for flat even light, and expect ordinary indoor bulbs to push a yellow tint into the fabric. None of that requires gear. If you’re setting up with what’s in your pocket, the tripod-and-window routine I laid out in this walkthrough covers the physical half of the problem.
Backdrops are the other half. Depop suggests white or gray for video because it reads clean and professional, and the same logic holds for your hero shot. When the room won’t cooperate, Araluma’s background remover can cut the garment out so you can place it on a plain fill.
Cutouts come with a caveat, though. Fine edges (hair, fringe, open knits) are where AI masks fail first, and a ragged silhouette looks worse than a busy bedroom floor. The fixes I collected for eBay cutout edges transfer to Depop without modification. My position: cut out the hero shot if you must, but keep at least one photo obviously unretouched, because trust is the currency on a resale app.
One thing never to do is pad empty slots with a brand’s catalog images. Depop calls stock photos a copyright breach and says listings that use them will probably be removed.
The video slot is underpriced
Depop’s blog states that listings with video are, on average, around twice as likely to sell within 30 days. For a slot most sellers leave empty, that is a serious lever. Depop’s video guide is specific about the mechanics: trim the clip to 5–15 seconds, show a 360-degree view of the item, and pick a deliberate cover frame because the video is the first thing a buyer sees on the listing. Skip narration entirely; audio is muted on upload anyway.
The real cost is time. A 15-second shoot, per listing, across a 60-item shop is a full afternoon. If you batch-list cheap basics, reserve video for the pieces with actual margin and let the $8 t-shirts ride on four good photos.
Depop photo FAQ
What size should Depop photos be?
Export square at 1280×1280 pixels. Depop’s documentation does not publish a pixel requirement, so the 1280 figure is the convergence point of third-party guides rather than an official spec. In my test, a quality-85 JPEG at that size weighed 116 KB, light enough to upload from any phone connection.
What happens if a photo isn’t square?
It gets displayed in a square frame regardless, and the edges don’t survive. A 4:3 phone photo effectively surrenders a quarter of its pixels to the 1:1 shape; a 3:2 camera shot surrenders a third. Crop the square yourself before uploading so you decide what gets kept, instead of the app deciding for you.
How long can a Depop listing video be?
Depop’s guidance is to trim the clip to between 5 and 15 seconds. Each listing takes one video alongside its four photo slots, the audio is muted on upload, and Depop recommends choosing the cover frame deliberately since the video plays before anything else on the listing.
Everything measured here is Depop as documented today, and marketplaces re-spec quietly. The prep that works for Shopify product listings does not transfer one-to-one to a resale feed, and today’s resale spec will drift too. So before you batch-reshoot a 200-item shop, spend five minutes confirming the square is still the frame. The crop forgives a loose composition, never a tight one.
