Reorder photos and choose your cover

The first photo is the cover, and the place to change the order is your listing's manage screen, not the posting form.

While you are posting

The photo row in the posting form adds and removes, and the first tile is marked as the cover. There is no drag-to-reorder there. If the wrong photo is first, remove the ones ahead of it and add them back in the order you want, or publish and fix the order on the manage screen in a few seconds.

After it is live

Open your listing and use Edit, which takes you to the manage screen for that listing. The same page is behind the manage link in the email sent when you posted, and you can have that link sent again from /post/resend-link. In the Photos grid there:

• Drag a photo onto the position you want.
• Or use the arrows on the tile to move it one place left or right, which is the easier path on a touchscreen.
• Or focus a tile with the keyboard and press the arrow keys.
• Or press Make cover on any other tile to send that photo straight to the front, which on a listing with many photos saves a long walk with the arrows.

The first tile carries a Cover badge. The new order saves by itself a moment after your last move: you will see "Saving" and then "Saved". If a save fails, the grid goes back to the order the listing really has, with the reason next to it, so make the move again. A photo you removed comes back if its removal did not save, because it is still on the listing. New photos you add are kept on screen even when saving them fails, and a Retry button saves them without uploading them again. Leaving the page also tries once more.

Why the cover is worth thinking about

It is the one image that decides whether anyone opens the listing at all. It appears in the browse feed, in search results, on category pages, in saved items, and on the listing card inside a message thread. The rest only get looked at afterwards.

A cover that works: the whole item in the frame, shot in daylight, against a plain background, filling most of the picture. A cover that does not: a collage, a stock photo, a screenshot of the manufacturer's page, a dark corner of a room with the item somewhere in it.

Then order the rest the way a buyer would want to look: the front, the other sides, the label or model number, and last the honest close-up of the scratch. Showing the flaw yourself is what stops the buyer haggling over it at the meeting.