Questions

Have a question for myself or the community about dealer websites, lead vendors, crm/ilm or something general about Internet sales? Email me, and I'll post it on the site.

Web Tools

Spice up your Vehicle Inventory Photos.

Posted by Jeff Kershner | Monday, May 22, 2006 | Posted in Internet Sales Tools

I’m always on the prowl for new software to add some spice to my online marketing. I came across this program, FastStone Photo Resizer.

FastStone Photo Resizer is an image converter / resizer intended to enable users to convert, rename, resize, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode.

The features that I find most handy is the text and watermarking. Getting your contact information (phone number and dealers URL) on your vehicle inventory photos is a great practice. I subscribe to several different ad sources for our pre-owned inventory and send many of our vehicles to several different free listing sites. Many of these sites don’t have your phone number prominently displayed nor do they allow you to have your dealers URL displayed on the vehicle details page.

With the watermark feature you can get fancy and place a CPO Logo on your photos. Why not build value in your vehicles with your photos as well?

Most of the features (convert, rename, resize) you won’t need if you have a decent vehicle inventory management system (like Homenetinc.com ..yea that was a plug but they don’t pay me for it.) but if you want to send your photos somewhere like a free listing page, they sometimes restrict the size of photo you can send. So the resizing feature can come in handy.

If you’ve been wanting to add your phone number or your dealerships URL to your inventory photos, this is an easy to use software that will get the job done for you quickly! Check it out!

Note: I don’t know these guys personally but if you use the product, donate some money their way via PayPal or pay for a licensed version. It’s cheap!

Go here to DOWNLOAD

7 Comments

Ray

May 22nd, 2006

Jeff,

That is a good find. I never thought about watermarking pictures before uploading them. This would really help get your URL and dealership name out there when using third party listing sites. Sometimes accessing the dealership URL or phone number is not so easy on some sites.

This would be a good feature to add to an online inventory management system. I’ll have to keep that in mind.
Farooq

May 23rd, 2006

J,

It’s a really a nice tool. One can always do this by creating a droplet in adobe image ready. As far as inventory management goes our product AutoJini.com has this feature.
Jake Wirth

May 23rd, 2006

GREAT Product!!! Can’t Believe it’s FREE for Home Users.

The Batch Rename Utility is handy when you have to FTP or Batch Upload Photos of Inventory to different Used Classifieds Services (AutoTrader, Cars.com, VEHIX) using different filenames. You can change them all at once!!!
Andrew Salamone

April 30th, 2007

I agree regarding the importance of image water marking.

Users of our CarSpot Pro+Solo can automatically name photos, resize, create thumbnails, watermark, etc. Users can even automatically insert extra photos (such as of the sales person or a last photo about why to buy from a particular dealer).

The system is rules-based so for example a car with less than 10,000 miles can automatically be branded as “Low Miles!” or a vehicle that is manufacturer certified can be listed as such automatically.

You can also send a different version to different vendors–i.e. you can use one toll-free tracking number on your AutoTrader ads, and another tracking number on your Cars.com ads.

I think the link Jeff sent is great for a free solution, but if someone is truly looking to automate these processes, our system may be worth checking out at: http://www.carsgofaster.com
Matt Watson

January 13th, 2008

They key is to add dealer branding to your photos so they stand out amongst the crowd on classified websites. Get your logo and phone number in front of the consumer.

Here are some good examples of photo branding:
http://www.vinsolutions.com/PhotoBranding.aspx
Joe

December 12th, 2008

Thanks I love this software tool for my inventory pics!
Branding Your Photo's with an Overlay - DealerRefresh Automotive Technology Forums

June 24th, 2009

[...] with an Overlay Blake, I wrote a post over on DealerRefresh way back in the day about this. Spice up your Vehicle Inventory Photos I always use the Faststone Photo Resizer for my overlays. It’s a quick and simple program and it [...]