How to search eBay with a photo when you don't know the name

eBay has a camera button, and most people never press it

If you're holding something and have no idea what it's called, the usual move is to describe it to eBay and hope. "Old folding camera brown leather." "Clear glass mixing bowl vintage." You get thousands of results back, and none of them are obviously the thing in your hand.

There's a faster way in. eBay's search bar has a camera button, on eBay.com and on eBay.fr too. Press it, give it a picture, and eBay looks for listings whose photos look like yours, instead of listings whose titles share your words.

The catch is that a photo search is how you learn what a thing is called. It isn't how you keep watching for it, because you can't save a photo and run it again tomorrow. So this post starts with pictures and ends with words.

What came back when we tried it

We tried it with two photos, both free-to-use pictures from Wikimedia Commons, so neither one came from an eBay listing.

The first was a Polaroid SX-70, the folding instant camera Polaroid sold in the 1970s, sitting on its own against a plain background. On eBay.com, all ten top results were SX-70s. Their titles hand you everything you need for a text search: "Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera," plus the words sellers put around it, like "folding," "instant film," "tested" and "for parts or repair."

The second was a plain clear glass mixing bowl on a slatted garden bench, with no maker's mark anywhere in the shot. All ten top results were clear glass bowls, which is fair enough. But they came from at least three makers (Anchor Hocking, Pyrex and a Sunbeam mixer bowl), and a glass fishbowl snuck in too. The photo told eBay what kind of thing it was. It couldn't say whose bowl it was, because nothing in the picture said so.

Two photos is a small test, so don't read it as a verdict on how good eBay's matching is. eBay doesn't say how the matching works. The pattern makes sense, though. Something distinctive with a well-known name comes back named. Something generic comes back as a category, and the last step is on you.

One more thing the table shows. On the UK and Australian sites, a lot of the top results came from sellers in other countries. If you only want to buy from sellers in your own country, check the item location before you get attached to a listing.

Take the photo the way a listing photo looks

You're asking eBay to match your picture against millions of seller photos, so make yours look like a seller photo. eBay doesn't publish tips for this. These are what made the difference between our two results, and they cost nothing to try.

• Put one object in the frame. A camera on a shelf full of other cameras gives the search four things to match. Move it somewhere on its own first.
• Use a plain background. A table, a bedsheet or a sheet of paper will do. Our bowl on a slatted bench is the cautionary tale, since the slats show straight through clear glass.
• Shoot the side that makes it different. The front of a camera, the patterned side of a dish, the dial of a watch. The bottom of a mug looks like the bottom of every mug.
• Crop in close before you search. Most of a phone photo is floor or tabletop, and none of that helps.
• Look for a mark, and read it. Plenty of glass, pottery and tools carry a maker's name or a model number on the base or the back. If yours has one, that's often a faster route to a name than any photo. Type what it says into an ordinary search.

If the first try comes back as a category, like our bowl did, try another photo from a different angle before you give up. Then read the titles of the closest matches. Even when they disagree about the maker, they usually agree on what the thing is called, and that's the phrase you take into a text search.

Photo search works on four of the 14 eBay sites we cover

FindersKeepers searches 14 eBay sites, one at a time. You pick a site, and every search, saved search and watched item follows it. eBay only lets outside tools like ours use its photo search on four of those sites, so that's where our camera button shows up.

On the other ten, our camera button is hidden. eBay's own camera button still shows up on eBay.fr, though, so if you shop on one of those sites, use eBay's button to get the name. Then bring the name back to whatever you use for alerts.

On the four sites where it works, our photo search takes a picture from your phone's camera or a file you upload, up to 10 MB.

Turn the name into a search that keeps looking

A photo search shows you what's listed right now. Whatever goes up tonight, or next Tuesday, won't be in it. On FindersKeepers a photo search also leaves the search box empty, so there's nothing to save until you type the name in yourself. Words are what get saved and re-run, so switch to them as soon as you have the right ones.

Here's how that goes, using the camera:

1. Run the photo search to get the name. Copy the phrase the closest matches agree on. For the camera, that's "Polaroid SX-70."
2. Search that phrase as text. Now you can add the words that matter to you, like "tested" if you want one that works, or "for parts" if you're happy to repair one.
3. Check the deal labels. FindersKeepers compares each listing's asking price with similar active listings on the same eBay site, and won't label anything until it has at least five to compare against. HOT DEAL means 20 percent or more below their average. Good Price means 10 to 20 percent below.
4. Save it as an alert. If you're not signed in, a box shows up after the third listing offering hourly alerts for your search. Type your email, tap the link we send you, and the search is saved with email alerts on. There's no password, and no account until you tap that link.

After that we re-run the search once an hour and email you anything new. No new listings means no email, so a quiet inbox just means a quiet hour on eBay.

What a photo can't tell you

A match isn't a verdict. A listing that looks like your photo can still be a reproduction, a different year, or a camera that doesn't fire. Photo search can't tell whether something works, and neither can a price comparison, so read the listing, the condition and the seller's photos like you would anywhere else.

It also can't tell you what something sold for. We don't have sold-price data, and our comparisons use asking prices only. For sold prices, eBay's own Sold items filter is the free place to look. A price history on FindersKeepers starts the day you start watching an item, and nobody can show you prices from before they started tracking, us included.

What the photo does give you is the one thing a text search needs and you didn't have: the name. Get the name, then let a saved search do the watching.