Photos on Listings and Lots: Buyers Get Pictures, Sellers Pick the Cover
Why a listing of thirty laptops stopped being text without a picture, and who decides which picture goes first.
A refurbisher opening a listing of thirty ThinkPads wants to see them. Not the grade table, not the spec sheet — those come second. The photos your operators took in Core on the day the pallet came in are the strongest signal a buyer gets before making an offer, and since 5 September 2026 they are on the buyer’s pages. The listing page (Market → Browse → listing) and the lot page (Auction → Browse lots → lot) both show a photo section built from the photos of the devices in that listing or lot.
What the buyer sees
A grid of thumbnails, a count above it — “Photos of 12 of 30 devices” — and a lightbox on click. The buyer sees the image and its sequence number, never the caption: captions stay internal to the seller. A listing with more than 24 photos shows the first 24 and a “+N more” button that loads the next 24 into the grid. A listing or lot with no devices shows no section at all; one with devices but no photos shows the count and an empty state, which is itself information. Twelve of thirty is an honest number, and a buyer who sees it knows exactly what to ask for.
What the buyer cannot see
A buyer gets photos only of devices in a listing or lot they are allowed to see under the normal visibility rules: published or open, public, and on the same side of the demo/real wall. Draft listings, other tenants’ stock and devices that are not sellable return nothing — not with a guessed id either, because the database function behind the section checks the visibility itself instead of trusting the page that called it. Thumbnails and full images are short-lived signed links; opening a full image is recorded as document access in the buyer’s own activity log, the same way the seller’s side already records it.
The cover
The seller sees the same section on their own listing page and lot page, with one extra control per photo: Set as cover. The cover goes first in the gallery and becomes the thumbnail on the overviews. Without a choice, the oldest photo of the first device is the cover — a safe default, rarely the best one. Picking the cover is the cheapest pricing decision your trader will make all week.
Thumbnails on browse
The browse overviews show the cover as a thumbnail: per listing in the listing column of Market → Browse, per lot on the card in Auction → Browse lots, where it replaces the hammer icon. Without photos, the listing gets a neutral frame and the lot keeps its icon. The thumbnails are short-lived signed links too, generated only for the listings and lots on the page being shown, so the platform is not handing out links to inventory nobody scrolled to.
Where the photos come from
Photos reach devices through General → Photos or the mobile capture screen. One upload links the photo to the Core asset and to its sellable item, so the same picture travels with the device into whichever listing or lot it ends up in. There is no separate “listing photo” upload to keep in sync, and no second copy to forget. Photograph the device once, at intake, and every buyer who ever sees it sees that.