Gear photos sized for Reverb's 1:1 crop — serial, electronics, honest wear

Reverb's photo rules are stricter than they look — and different from fashion resale

Reverb is the musical-instruments and pro-audio resale marketplace, launched 2013 and acquired by Etsy in 2019 before a 2024 divestiture. Unlike Vinted, Depop, or Grailed, the platform publishes its photo rules in the help centre — and they're more prescriptive than most casual sellers realise. Reverb Listing Standards set a hard floor of 620x620 px and a hard ceiling of 1600x1600 px, and the crop is enforced 1:1 square. Portrait shots of upright basses and landscape shots of long rack gear get auto-cropped to square, which means sellers who don't pre-crop lose the headstock, the pedal end of the chain, or the rear-panel tube layout. Reverb allows up to 25 photos per listing and explicitly prohibits added text, graphics, borders, collaged or composite images, explicit imagery, and distracting image alterations. Watermarks are permitted only if they are small, transparent, and off the gear itself. Screenshots, stock images, and internet-sourced catalogue photos are all banned — violations flag the listing.

What Reverb requires beyond the pixel spec is category-specific. Guitars need back, headstock, serial, and electronics shots at minimum. Acoustic and hollow-body instruments need a soundhole label peek. Amps need panel, back, and tube-layout detail; boutique pedals need serial and power-input macros. Reverb's audience is a knowledgeable-enthusiast register — musicians, small music shops, luthiers, pro-audio studios offloading kit — and photo copy that sanitises visible wear breaks trust immediately. A Fender with buckle rash, a Gretsch with finish checking, a Marshall with faded tolex are not defects to hide; they are provenance and tone character that move price. The tool is built around this reality: the hero gets the neutral-backdrop cleanup so the instrument reads professional in the feed thumbnail, and every detail and wear frame is left exactly as captured. The 1000x1000 default sits in the middle of Reverb's 620-to-1600 bounds, giving headroom for retina sharpness on detail shots while staying inside the file-size envelope community sellers converge on.

Why gear listings reward honesty over polish

Reverb's buyers are gear-literate. They zoom on fret wear to gauge playing hours. They read serial and trafo-date codes to confirm production year. They expect a scratched scratchplate on a 1971 Telecaster — its absence is the red flag, not its presence. Any photo tool that defaults to Amazon-style sanitised backdrops misreads this audience. The preset respects the register: clean the hero because feed thumbnails reward it, leave everything else raw because the buyers genuinely want to see it. That is the difference between a listing that sells at ask and one that stalls at an offer chain.