What a condition photo must show, and what it must never hide

Every reseller has had the same moment of hesitation. There is a small mark on the hem, barely visible, and photographing it clearly feels like handing the buyer a reason to scroll past. So the photograph gets taken from slightly further away, or in slightly softer light, and the description says "excellent vintage condition" and moves on.

This is understandable and it is a mistake, for reasons that are commercial rather than moral.

Disclosure raises the price you can ask

The counterintuitive finding across resale platforms is that listings with clearly disclosed and photographed flaws sell for more than comparable listings described vaguely as "good condition".

The mechanism is straightforward. A buyer looking at a second-hand garment assumes there is something wrong with it, because there usually is. If you do not tell them what, they assume the worst and price the risk into what they are willing to pay. If you show them a two-centimetre mark on an inside seam, the unknown collapses into a known, and a known small flaw is worth far less discount than an unknown potentially large one.

You are not adding a flaw by photographing it. The flaw is already there. You are removing uncertainty, and uncertainty is the expensive part.

What must always be shown

Some things are not optional, regardless of how minor they seem:

• Any hole, tear or split seam, however small, and however easily repaired.
• Stains and discolouration, including underarm yellowing, which buyers specifically look for and specifically complain about.
• Pilling and bobbling on knitwear, photographed close enough to judge severity.
• Sole wear, heel drag and creasing on footwear.
• Missing buttons, broken zips, replaced hardware.
• Alterations, including shortened hems and taken-in seams, which change the effective size from what the label says.
• Fading, particularly on black cotton and denim, which photographs very differently from how it looks in person.

The test is simple: if you would be annoyed to discover it after paying, photograph it.

How to photograph a flaw well

Badly photographed disclosure is nearly as bad as none, because a blurry close-up of something dark reads as evasive.

Get close, and get focus. Tap the screen on the flaw itself so the phone focuses there rather than on the fabric behind it. Most flaw photographs fail because the camera focused on the wrong plane.

Use raking light. Texture-based flaws — pilling, scuffs, embossing damage — are nearly invisible under flat light and obvious when light comes across the surface at a shallow angle. Turn the garment toward a window rather than facing it straight on.

Include something for scale. A coin or a fingertip next to a mark tells the buyer whether it is two millimetres or two centimetres. Without it they will assume the larger.

Photograph in the same light as the rest of the listing. A flaw shot under a different lamp introduces a colour shift that makes the mark look worse or better than it is, and either way undermines the accuracy of everything else.

What must never be hidden

Some techniques are legitimate improvements and some are misrepresentation, and the line is clearer than it looks.

Legitimate: better lighting, a clean background, ironing or steaming the garment, styling it well, removing a distracting object from the frame.

Not legitimate: editing out a stain, cloning over a hole, using a filter heavy enough to disguise fading, photographing only the good side of a garment with a known flaw on the other, or using a photograph of a similar item rather than the actual one.

The practical test is whether the buyer, holding the item, would feel the photograph had told them the truth. Improving how a real garment is presented passes that test. Changing what the garment is does not.

This applies to restaging tools as much as to editing. A tool that puts your jacket on a clean background is doing the first thing; a tool that quietly smooths away the fade on the shoulders is doing the second, and it will cost you a return and a rating.

Write the description to match

Photographs and text have to agree. A listing where the photographs show a mark and the description says "no flaws" is worse than either alone, because it reads as carelessness about everything else too.

Describe flaws by location, size and type, in that order: "small ink mark, approximately 5mm, on the inside of the left cuff". Buyers scanning quickly can then match your text to the photograph without hunting.

The reputational compounding

The final argument is the one that matters over a year rather than a listing. Resale platforms rank sellers on ratings, and ratings are driven overwhelmingly by whether the item matched its description. A seller who discloses everything gets fewer sales per listing and dramatically better ratings, and the ratings feed back into visibility.

Under-disclosure is a strategy that works beautifully for about thirty listings and then stops working permanently.