Caveat Emptor - Always Read The Fine Print.

In over 20 years buying on ebay, I have never bought any stamp or stamp lot where the seller claims the use of stock p[hotos.

For a while when I was filling Big Blue I would purchase on Bid Start. I would never ever consider buying from a stock photo as pictured but asked the seller to send me a scan of the stamp I would be purchasing. This was successful. No one ever used a bait and switch on me with a different catalogue number. That is damning.

30 seconds to scan and upload an image... that sounds about as credible as buying a nice imperf revenue for 1.5% of catalog

When I've had the occasion to do this sort of thing, I would scan an entire Vario page of stamps at once then crop each stamp one at a time. Makes things go pretty fast but not sure how fast exactly.

There is one particular seller on Bidstart/Hipstamp who sent me 6 or 7 stamps based on a stock photo and they were all substantially lower quality than the stock photo. Issues with tones, spots, perfs, and centering all made an appearance. And his odious attitude about things was far less than exemplary. He should stick to writing because he's a fail as an honorable stamp seller.

Strange. I thought I was lucid. I will reexamine. I am getting up there.

"When I've had the occasion to do this sort of thing, I would scan an entire Vario page of stamps at once then crop each stamp one at a time. Makes things go pretty fast but not sure how fast exactly."

It is not close to 30 seconds when you have to put the stamps into the sheet, run the scanner, take the stamps out of the sheet, upload the images, edit the images(notice I didn't say enhance) in your software, then identify the specific images to make sure you have good inventory control and then upload and describe the stamps to your favorite ecommerce site....perhaps I missed a step or 2. 30 seconds?? Really?

Perhaps I am missing the forest for the trees here and there is a super fast way of doing this. Educate me. Step by step.

A stock photo approach (time is money) could supply more people with a good priced stamp. I am fine with that as I am sure many pleased collectors are too. My experience, I should have noted, was geared for me at that particular collecting time in my life.

For my purposes, I didn't remove the stamps from the Vario pages after scanning. The Vario page became the stock location for sales. That said, I really have no idea how long it took for each stamp on average and I never listed more than maybe 50 items at a time for ebay so it was strictly part time stuff.

Steps to 30 second scanning.

(1) Lay stamp on scanner bed. I use a black cardboard which I lay over the stamp. It does not need to be perfectly centered. In fact, it's best if it is at an angle.

(2) Preview the scanned item. I have a box preset on the scanning program and drag it so the stamp is centered within the box.

(3) Scan the stamp.

(4) Use the edit feature to center and crop the image. Save.

Done.

Note. Okay, 30 seconds might have been a bit short. It took 42 seconds total on three stamps (42 seconds each).