Most phones bought in the last few years are perfectly good enough for listing photos. So why do so many listing photos still look like phone photos? It is rarely the camera. It is a tilted frame, a dark room, a cluttered counter, a thumb in the corner, and a wide-angle lens that makes a bedroom look like a corridor.
All of that is fixable in an afternoon, with the phone you already have.
Prepare the room before you pick up the phone
Most of the work happens before the first photo. Walk through the flat with the owner or tenant and spend ten minutes on this:
- Clear kitchen counters and bathroom shelves completely.
- Straighten beds, and move clothes, shoes and bags out of sight.
- Open every curtain and blind, then switch on every light.
- Close the toilet seat and hide mops, buckets and dustbins.
- Remove family photos and anything with a name or address on it.
- Wipe the camera lens with a soft cloth. A lens that lives in a pocket leaves a haze over every shot.
Timing matters too. Shoot in daylight, and mid-morning usually gives soft, even light. Say you are listing a west-facing 2 BHK in Andheri: avoid late afternoon, when the sun pours straight in and turns the windows white.
Hold the phone like a photographer
Three habits separate a considered photo from a snapshot.
Shoot rooms in landscape, holding the phone sideways. Websites and portals show wide frames, and a room reads better wide than tall.
Hold the phone at chest height and keep it upright, not tilted up or down. When you tilt, the walls lean inwards and the room looks like it is falling over. Turn on the grid lines in your camera settings and line up a door frame or the edge of a wall with one of them.
Shoot from a corner or a doorway, so the photo shows the shape of the room and how much floor there is. Standing in the middle of a room and pointing at a wall shows the wall.
Then there is the wide lens. Most phones have a 0.5x ultra-wide lens, and it is tempting. It fits the whole room in. It also stretches the edges and makes a small room look larger than it is.
A buyer who sees a big bedroom online and walks into a small one feels misled, and they are right to. Use the normal lens for most shots. If a small room genuinely cannot be captured any other way, the wide lens is fine, but stand back from the corner rather than pressing into it, and keep the phone level so the distortion stays mild.
Light and exposure
Turn the flash off. It flattens the room and bounces off tiles and glass.
Leave HDR on or on automatic. It helps the phone handle a bright window and a darker room in the same frame.
Tap the screen to focus on the room. If the windows turn pure white, slide the brightness control that appears beside the focus box down a little. A visible view through the window is often a selling point, so it is worth keeping.
Try not to mix light colours. A room lit by warm yellow bulbs and cool daylight at once looks muddy. If the flat has both, switch off the yellow ones for daytime shots.
The shot list
Buyers want to see a home in the order they would walk through it. A fixed shot list also means none of your listings is missing the one photo a buyer needed. For a typical flat, cover these:
- The building from the street, and the entrance or gate.
- The living room from two corners.
- The kitchen, showing the counter and storage.
- Each bedroom, from the doorway or a corner.
- Each bathroom, in one clean shot.
- The balcony, and the view from it.
- Parking, lifts and any common facilities that actually exist.
That usually comes to twelve to twenty photos. Put the strongest one first, since it becomes the cover image in most places.
Edit lightly, and never deceive
Straighten, crop and lift the brightness slightly. That is enough. Do not add filters, swap a grey sky for a blue one, or drop in virtual furniture unless you clearly label it. If a photo needs heavy editing to look acceptable, retake it.
Accurate photos protect you. The visit confirms what the buyer already expects, and they arrive ready to talk about price rather than disappointed at the door. The same logic applies to PGs and rentals, which we cover in PG photos that don't mislead.
Before uploading, write a short caption for each photo, such as "Master bedroom with east window". It helps a buyer scrolling on a phone, and it gives search engines words to understand the image. Large photo files also slow a page down on mobile data, so a good website resizes them for you. Our piece on why speed on a 4G phone decides who calls you explains why that matters.
Your job this week
Pick one listing with weak photos and reshoot it using the shot list above. Book a morning slot, spend ten minutes preparing the flat, keep the phone level and stay on the normal lens. Then put the new set beside the old one and compare.
Once you are comfortable, the same preparation works for video. Video walkthroughs without a crew is the next step.
