We all get to work with the consistency of squares

At the start of June, a lot of Etsy sellers started noticing their shop thumbnails were appearing as squares, instead of the slightly rectangular shape (5×4 in technical terms) that have been for… since time began.

To begin with, we all believed it was another test, some people could see the new square shape, and others could see the original rectangle shape. But as the month went on, it appears we’ve all been swapped over — or they’ve just expanded their test. Only time will tell.

A lot of people are annoyed at the change, rightly so, because they’ve worked hard to style their thumbnail images in the space provided. And if you have hundreds of listings that now look slightly off, it’s a lot of work to fix up.

However, the Etsy mobile app shows your shop thumbnails as squares, so I believe Etsy is just making the thumbnails consistent across all platforms.

This is useful because we don’t have to choose which shape to style our thumbnails for, they will look the same for everyone browsing. And, if we’re posting on Instagram, it also means slightly less work as we can use the same images everywhere.

But…

In true Etsy fashion, it’s not all streamlined yet (and may never be).

In your listings manager, setting up your thumbnail is still the rectangle shape, not square. So if you adjust your images to fit, you might have a bit of guesswork to do.

I am glad they’re starting to make their thumbnails consistent. If this is still in the testing stage, I hope they work out what they’re doing soon and fix the listing manager to also reflect what buyers see, to make our lives a bit easier.

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