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About Real Estate Photos
In order to understand how to best present your property on line, it helps to understand exactly where and how Internet users will see your property presented. For listed properties we can break that down into 4 categories:
1. MLS and IDX 2. Realtor.com 3. Aggregation sites - Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo, Google base, etc. 4. Agent and single property web sites
1. MLS and IDX - When entering a listing into TMLS, an agent can input up to 12 photos of a listing. These photos files are resized by the MLS and attached to the listing. Viewers with access to actual MLS pages (agents and clients and customers they have sent MLS sheets to) access the photos by clicking on the main picture on the MLS sheet, which pops up a new window with all 12 photos in it. The new window also includes tabs for putting all of the photos in a slide show the user can click through and a tab for links to virtual tours if any are attached to the listing. IDX basically presents the same images without the slide show feature. MLS and IDX images range from around 7 kb (in the MLS slideshow and IDX multiple images) to 25 - 50 kb for full size MLS or IDX images. An aspect ratio (width to height) of 4:3 is used, either 256 x 192 pixels for thumbnails or 640 x 480 pixels for full size images. Images that do not fit that ratio will be stretched to fit that frame. Photos can be oriented either landscape (horizontal dimension of 640) or portrait (vertical dimension of 640). Some things to keep in mind when creating photo files to submit to MLS: a. Files of up to 2 mb can be submitted but will be resized to file sizes mentioned above. File compression means loss of information and can result in images that look far different than the original file. Loss of information shows itself most dramatically in colors that appear very different from those in the original file and a dramatic loss of sharpness, making images appear fuzzy or out of focus. These problems are difficult to eliminate entirely, but submitting smaller files that will undergo less data loss can help. Photos used in many virtual tours experience these same issues. Properly sizing and optimizing files for their particular use is very important as to how the photos will appear to the end user - hopefully someone who is interested in buying a home or a potential seller wanting to see how their home will appear on line if they list with you. b. Photos submitted with a different aspect ratio than the 4:3 can be altered dramatically by being stretched to fit that frame, resulting in doors, windows, cabinets, etc that appear distorted (because they are). c. It is impossible to control exactly how photos submitted to MLS will appear since once submitted, you lose control of how your files are treated. Preserving image quality does not appear to be a high priority of Tempo. The current system does, however, allow 2 links to external tours of the property. As mentioned above, many tour sites will do similar things to your photos as it resizes the files for tour use. One way to allow end users the ability to see high quality images of the property is to use one of these links to a slide show of unaltered image files. It currently appears that only the first of these external links will be availableto IDX users, and you must be careful how you input the link to Tempo. MLS tour links will work with or without http:// at the beginning. When an IDX page is created, http:// is automatically added to the tour url, creating an error for those that already have http:// in the address. What this basically means is that if you cut and paste an address into Tempo, take off the http:// at the beginning and it should work for both MLS and IDX. Leave http:// on and it will work on MLS, but not IDX. 2. Realtor.com – Realtor .com offers basically 3 options. One is the do nothing option. If you don't buy an upgraded package, your listing will appear with the main MLS photo and limited, poorly presented information. For $20 per listing, you can upgrade with a link to a virtual tour, although the listing info will still be poorly presented. Those agents who purchase enhanced packages have the ability to change how the information is presented (although it is amazing how many pay for this feature and don't use it) and add up to 25 pictures and a tour link. Realtor.com images use a 3:2 aspect ratio, so photos sized for TMLS at 4:3 will appear with white space on either side of the image. Realtor.com files appear to average about 15 kb, so submitting 3:2 aspect ratio files of around 15 kb should get you the best (clearly a relative term) results on Realtor.com. 3. Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo, Google, etc. - numerous aggregation sites exist, with more being created all of the time. These sites seek to be the one destination for all real estate needs and collect information from a variety of sources. TMLS, through ListHub (http://www.listhub.net/) allows agents to select to send their listings to many of these sites. Others require agents to submit listings individually or to set up their own feeds. These sites are extremely varied in how they collect and present information on properties for sale. Some link back to an IDX site, others to an agent web site still others to a site like Homes and Land Magazine. While these sites do draw a lot of traffic, my experience with buyers is that most serious buyers use an IDX site to do most of their searches. 4. Agent and single property websites - These are where you have the most control over how your listings are presented, depending on how you set them up. Custom designed sites allow you total control over the content and the photo files, allowing you to present high quality images that have not been degraded by somebody else's software. There are trade offs with file size and speed of loading, but in general, you should be able to display great looking, sharp photos that display in a reasonably quick time frame, especially for end users with broad band connections. Template sites will be more limited, and may pose some of the same issues that are discussed above. Custom sites will generally be more expensive than template sites, but may be worth the extra expense, depending on the property being marketed. A custom site may also be used as a template site, so your extra expense may be paid just once on the initial set up, then spread over many listings over time.
Hope this helps you understand a little better why your photos look the way they do on these different sites. Goddin Real Estate Photography creates photo packages with images optimized to look the best for these different situations.
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Goddin Real Estate Photography