User Guide
ShelfDrop turns a pile of photos into a ready-to-import Whatnot listing file. You shoot your items, the AI reads each one and fills in the title, description, and details, and you export a CSV that drops straight into Whatnot's bulk uploader. What used to be an hour of typing becomes a few minutes of review.
This guide walks the whole process, start to finish, plus the tricks that make the AI accurate and the habits that keep you from losing work on big batches.
ShelfDrop figures out where one item ends and the next begins by looking for a divider photo — a plain, filler shot with no item in it. Anything works as long as it's a continuous surface with no text or edges: a blank patch of leather, a solid-colored mat, the back of a folder, your table.
So your camera roll should look like this:
Everything between two dividers becomes one item. The dividers themselves get thrown away automatically — they never show up as listings.
If you don't use dividers, ShelfDrop can't know where to split, and you'll get one giant item instead of many. Dividers are the whole trick.
On the home screen you'll see 📷 Tap or drag your full batch of photos here. Tap it and select your entire batch from the camera roll at once — dividers and all.
While the batch loads, you'll see a Preparing X/Y… counter. On a big batch (a couple hundred photos) this takes a few minutes, because each photo is being shrunk and prepped.
Once the photos finish loading, ShelfDrop groups them into separate items using your dividers and drops each group into its own slot. You'll see them under 📦 Item Slots. The dividers are gone; each slot is one future listing.
At this point the titles and descriptions are still blank — the actual reading happens in Step 5, once you've reviewed the groupings and set your defaults.
Give the slots a quick pass before reading. Each slot shows its photos and its fields.
If two items got merged into one slot (a divider was missing or too busy): select the photos that belong to the second item and use Move to new slot to split them off into their own item.
If a divider slipped through as its own tiny slot: just delete it, or clear that slot.
Adding more photos: each slot has its own 📷 Tap or drag photos here area, and you can add empty slots with + Add One More Slot or Add Slots.
Rather than typing the same category and price on every item, set them once in the settings and apply to all.
Then hit ⤓ Apply these settings to all items to push those values onto every slot at once. It only touches the category/price/shipping-type fields — it never overwrites titles or the AI descriptions.
Presets and saved descriptions: if you run different show formats (estate, occult, pallet), save your common setups so you can reload them next time instead of re-entering everything.
Per-item custom notes: any individual item can take its own note that gets added on top of the global one.
The same settings panel holds the SKU Builder — covered next.
If you track your inventory — where you bought each item, what it cost, where it's shelved — ShelfDrop can stamp every listing with a SKU and fill in Whatnot's Cost Per Item field automatically. If you don't need this, skip the whole section; nothing here is required to list.
What you get: each listing gets a SKU you design (like mckays-1.99-070426-3), and the cost you enter flows straight into Whatnot's Cost Per Item column for your profit tracking.
Each item card has four tracking fields, alongside the usual title/price/condition:
Every one of these is per item, so a single batch can mix sources, dates, costs, and bins freely.
In the settings panel, the SKU Builder lets you decide what your SKUs look like. There's a format box showing tokens like {source}-{cost}-{date}-{bin}, a row of chips (+ source + cost + date + bin + condition + number) that add each piece, and a live preview so you see the result as you build it. Tap the chips in whatever order you want — a dash is placed between each piece automatically so it stays readable. Your format is remembered for next time.
Formatting is handled for you: the date becomes 070426, the source is lowercased and cleaned (mckays), and everything is made SKU-safe. So McKays, cost 1.99, date 7/4/26, bin 3 with the format {source}-{cost}-{date}-{bin} produces:
Add the + number token and each item gets the next number in a running sequence (001, 002, 003…) that's tied to your account. It never repeats — even across separate batches and across your phone and desktop — so no two items ever share a number. Need to start over? There's a "reset the number to 1" link.
{number} tokens get their permanent sequential number.Manual override: the SKU box on each card is editable. Type your own and it sticks — Generate SKUs won't overwrite one you've entered by hand.
Hit ✨ Read & Upload All. This does two things for every item:
Watch the log as it runs. Items flip to a done state as they finish. If a read comes back off, you can edit any title or description by hand afterward — the AI gives you a strong starting point, not a locked result.
You can safely re-run Read & Upload All. It skips items that are already done and only re-does ones that errored or that you've changed (like a photo you rotated).
Hit ⬇ Download CSV. That file is formatted for Whatnot's bulk listing importer: category, title, description, price, shipping, condition, and up to 8 image URLs per item — plus SKU and Cost Per Item if you filled those in.
Before you trust a batch, spot-check it: open the CSV, grab an image URL from an item you rotated or edited, and paste it into a browser. If the image looks right there, it'll look right on Whatnot.
Then import the CSV into Whatnot. You have two options, depending on whether you're listing for a specific show or building up your inventory:
Use this to load items into your general inventory so you can add them to shows later. In the Whatnot Seller Hub:
Your items land in your inventory as drafts, ready to pull into any show whenever you want.
Use this when the items are for one specific upcoming show — import the CSV into that show's bulk uploader and they're attached to it right away.
Either way, review your drafts once they land.
A lot of sellers shoot and sort on the phone, then finish the typing on a desktop. ShelfDrop supports that:
Your photos, slots, and edits come with you.
Prevention first: the single best thing you can do is turn off Low Power Mode before a large load and keep the screen on. iOS can't run the load while the phone is locked, and Low Power Mode is what causes the auto-lock. Get that right and you'll never need the recovery below.
But if a load does get cut off partway (phone locked, app closed, browser crashed), ShelfDrop saves each photo as it loads. When you reopen the app you may see a banner:
Either way, you're picking up from where you stopped instead of starting over.
Each plan includes a set number of listings per month. Your allowance runs on a 30-day window from your signup date, not the calendar month, and you can see what's left in the app. If you're mid-batch when you reach the limit, the run you've already started is allowed to finish — you won't get cut off partway through uploading.
{cost} token needs a cost entered).