Top 5 Issues With Real Estate Photos Part 6 - Portrait vs Landscape Orientation

This comes up regularly across marketing desks everywhere, but mostly from Moe’s or Shmoe’s. The MLS listing system only accepts landscape orientation photos, yet we get a high number of portrait images that need to be edited with a white background to make it fit a landscape orientation. This reduces the height of the image and makes the flow of the 20 photos look strange and disjointed.

Think Wide for Real Estate, Never Tall - because you like a fat bottom line.

We at EPT use portrait images from time to time but only in the case of detail images that aren’t meant to go to MLS these photos are for features in print materials or on social platforms.

It is for the same reason you should never shoot vertical video even tho Instagram would like you to.. video is meant to be viewed on a widescreen for cinematic purposes.

This was the last in this series of posts - hope you found it informative.. from the desk of a real live Real Estate Marketer & Photo Editor.

Enjoy

*Information provided is based on TREB's MLS system and is generalized please check the exact specifications with the MLS Service in your area.

Top 5 Issues With Real Estate Photos Part 5 - Wrong Aspect Ratio

Pictures should maintain a 4:3 (landscape) ratio, ideally under 100kb or else the MLS system will compress the image, so although the recommended size is 640x480px we actually use 600x450px at the marketing office to avoid the MLS compression monster. We get many images that are not the correct sizing through our desks so we end up having to crop, and because the focal point of the room or area changes we have to do it manually instead of just setting up an action in Photoshop to crop a whole folder in a blur. It requires keyboard crunching at its finest to blow through the 20 maximum images and save them out properly. If you divide picture’s pixel width by its height, you should get 1.33 if not you have the wrong aspect ratio. If you want your photos to look good remember the 100kb file size limit also (TREB have relaxed on this in the last few years). If the aspect ratio isn’t correct then MLS will compress the size to fit, which means your photos will be squished or expanded to equal their aspect ratio, making for unprofessional looking images for the agent and photographer.

*Editors Note: TREB/MLS has relaxed some of these specs over the last few years and although it flags photos out of aspect ration we haven’t seen much of the stretching of images - if you are seeing stretched photos then correct the aspect ratio - to save on delivery we too now format our MLS images to 3:2 and have yet to see any ill effects.

*Information provided is based on TREB's MLS system and is generalized please check the exact specifications with the MLS Service in your area.

Top 5 Issues With Real Estate Photos Part 4 - Print vs Web Issues

This issue is probably the most contentious for most graphic designers/printers, as photographers properly expose in their cameras and calibrate to their own monitors and screens in post processing. The problem is that for MLS or web photos that is excellent but for print makes the images too dark on output on even the whitest of stock paper. Printing depending on the printer and calibration is always going to darken images by about 15% so your whites will be grey, your light greys will be medium greys, and so forth and you will lose all the detail in the shadows. Reason for this is your screen has light emitting through it even through blacks whereas paper does not emit light and depending on the stock you use will only darken this effect more depending on the shade of the stock and the mixed lighting environment it is viewed in. Newsprint is not only grey but it also absorbs ink because of the softer grain which creates an out of focus muddy look, so the darker the image the worse the effect. From a printers perspective the quickest way to correct this is with global adjustments on sets of images. As photographers and designers know global adjustments like that never produce a happy medium, better to locally adjust each image to get the desired result so that your hard earned images look stellar on all mediums especially in print which is the most costly of the mediums your images will be used on.

You should aim for images that are a quarter to half a stop brighter on screen by exposing to the right (ETTR) without blowing out the highlights, that way your clients get exceptional results and can heap praise and refer you to others, their Graphic Designer too will love you.

*Calibration is dependent on the accuracy of the equipment used by both yourself and the printer you deal with. In our case we calibrate our monitors and printers with X-rite i1 Pro Spectrophotometer and have balanced levels in-house and consistent external printer results. Check with your print provider or marketing departments to see a sample to evaluate your calibration in comparison.

* Our opinions are based on what we see come through our workstations, this is a generalized view of the local Toronto real estate market and is not exhaustive even to the local area.

Top 5 Issues With Real Estate Photos Part 3 - Wrong File Sizes

TREB (MLS) has a 100kb file size restriction per image (although that has been relaxed) before compression, as it speeds up the whole system and transfer to Realtor.ca. So if you want your images to look good aim for that file size. We get pro’s that send us TREB images that are over 1000kb’s which takes us longer to keyboard crunch down to size. It is just a waste of drive space for everyone on all sides, including longer downloads and uploads on both ends.

The bigger issue with file sizes though is that some Pro’s will send us images for print that are 1500x1000px and barely 600kb’s in size, which for smaller inset images is fine, but we also have larger full cover uses for the images and featured images that require higher quality files. As my banker says Bigger is better, as it provides us with higher quality finished results. Since those low resolution files are being compressed heavily from the original out of camera resolution, compression artifacts end up rearing their nasty head and banding can be seen in highlights (skies) and shadow areas even in properly exposed images. Also flat area tints often have damaged shades of colours when being over-compressed. The other extreme is we have been sent high res images in 8304x 4671px size which is overkill, unless designing for a billboard.

A good size for high resolution print at 300dpi is 3300x2550px (most in the 3000-4000px range is good for HD print resolution and helps to reduce jpeg artifacts on a properly exposed image), at that size the majority of printing needs are covered.

*Information provided is based on TREB's MLS system and is generalized please check the exact specifications with the MLS Service in your area.

Enjoy

Top 5 Issues With Real Estate Photos Part 2 - Photos Taken Out of Order

Usually the flow for photographing a property for example a home should be external front view, first level foyer, main room/living room, dining room, kitchen, family room if any, finishing with the bathrooms. Then proceed to the second floor bedrooms starting with the Master unless it is on a higher level. Ensuites should be photographed next to the bedrooms, if it is not an ensuite bath it should be placed at the end of the bedrooms. Then 3rd or more floors, and any terraces or balconies on the upper levels adjacent to the rooms they are attached to, then basement/lower level starting with the primary rooms and ending with the furnace room if necessary. Once the internal images are all captured then move to the final exterior images including the patio, garden, pool area, and culminating in the exterior boundaries area shots and garages.

That is the natural flow of the property in the eyes of a potential buyer and makes visual sense. It is surprising to me how many photo sets we get that have no logical shooting plan where everything is mixed up. What makes this situation more difficult to manage (as we have to reorder them for MLS and any marketing materials) is we will get this misaligned flow especially for vacant properties where almost all of the rooms look the same.

I am sure some of this is done in the post processing stage, but besides the realtor how is the designer supposed to guess the layout without a proper flow or floorplans. K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple) it for everyone.

We at EPT pride ourselves in re-organizing the photos before we package them with a natural flow, of course this is all to taste but in the eye of the viewer the property layout will make a lot more sense.

Top 5 Issues With Real Estate Photos Part 1 - What Realtors & Their Clients Should Look For

We manage a busy real estate marketing department with 2500+ listings a year as well as rapidly growing photography business. This means a minimum of 2500+ sets of images that flow through our workstations on a yearly basis for properties alone. Over 88K images roughly with 85-90% of those images requiring some form of editing and or post processing. 

We spend on average about 15 to 20 minutes per set cleaning and repairing photos at our marketing desk, which over the year works out to about 834 hours of editing work for photographs alone. This for the most part is from pro photographers, some want-to-be pro’s that we call Moe’s (who need “More” improvement in their photography or services), and of course we also get the usual small lease or complete tear-down vendor procured photos that leave a lot to be desired and require major editing (for rhyming purposes the Shmoe photos). All of this is aside from our editing for EPT (ElitePropertiesToronto.com).

So in an effort to improve our workflow and help others in the industry (Realtors/Photographers) we thought we would start a series on real estate photography/marketing and share our insight as a Photographer, Real Estate Marketer, and Former Instructor/Head for Digital Media and Marketing at an award winning local college. 

The five main issues we deal with in no particular order are (if you subtract removing weird items like Bobcats from driveways, photographers from mirrors, or even adding dogs to patio decks):

*Information provided is based on TREB's MLS system and is generalized please check the exact specifications with the MLS Service in your area.

This is Part 1 in the post series..