By Roshan L. D’Silva · Guide to Marketing Your Holiday Home
Your photographs decide whether anyone reads a single word you have written. Guests scan images, form a view in about two seconds, and only then look at the price and the description.
A note before the advice: this article describes rather than demonstrates. We do not hold a library of good and bad example shots of the same room, and inventing them would be worse than describing the fault precisely. Every problem below is one you can check for on your own listing this afternoon.
The six faults that cost bookings
1. Shot in the wrong light. Midday sun blows out windows and throws hard shadows. Photograph interiors in the soft light of mid-morning or late afternoon, and shoot the exterior and pool in the hour before sunset. The same room, same day, looks like a different property.
2. Too wide. An extreme wide-angle lens is the most common fault in holiday-let photography. It makes rooms look larger and, more importantly, it makes them look wrong — bent walls, a sofa stretched at the edge of frame. Guests cannot always name it, but they distrust it, and the ones who book arrive disappointed. Slightly wide is fine. Fish-eye is a broken promise.
3. Shot from standing height. Photographs taken from an adult's eye level look like estate-agent record shots. Drop the camera to about chest height, roughly 1.2 metres, and keep it level. Rooms immediately look more comfortable and less institutional.
4. Crooked verticals. If the door frames and wall corners lean, the room reads as subtly unsettling. Keep the camera level rather than tilted up or down — most phones will show you a level if you turn it on.
5. Clutter left in frame. Bins, cables, chargers, shampoo bottles, the drying rack, a stray shoe, fridge magnets, the television remote. Look at every corner of the frame before you press, not just the middle.
6. Missing the rooms people actually want to see. Listings routinely show four views of the pool and none of the second bathroom or the kitchen. Guests reading carefully assume the missing room is bad. It usually isn't, and the omission costs you the booking anyway.
The shots to take, in order
Your first image does most of the work. It should be the single most appealing, most representative view — usually the pool and terrace, or the main living space, or the view. Not the front door, and not a bedroom.
Then, in this order:
- The main living space, from the corner that shows the most of it
- The kitchen, clear and clean, from the doorway
- The dining table, laid
- Every bedroom, individually, made up with white linen
- Every bathroom, individually
- The outdoor space — terrace, pool, garden — in evening light
- The view, if you have one, shot from where a guest would stand
- One or two of the surroundings: the beach, the village, the walk
Twenty-five to thirty-five good photographs is about right. Fifty mediocre ones are worse than twenty good ones, and one bad photograph does more damage than a missing one.
Prepare the house first
The preparation matters more than the camera. Make every bed properly with fresh white linen and iron the creases out. Open all the curtains. Turn on every lamp — lit rooms photograph warmer, even in daylight. Straighten cushions. Put fresh flowers or a bowl of fruit somewhere. Clean the pool and skim it. Hide the bins, hoses, cables and drying rack entirely.
Photograph in the season your guests are booking for. A pool under a grey sky does not sell a summer week, and it is worth waiting for the right morning.
Phone or professional?
A modern phone, used in good light with the house properly prepared, produces entirely acceptable results — better than a professional working in bad light on an unprepared house.
That said, if you are letting seriously, a good local property photographer is among the highest-return things you can buy. It is a one-off cost against several years of bookings, and the difference is largest on exactly the properties owners find hardest to shoot: dark interiors, small rooms, difficult views.
Whichever you choose, reshoot after any significant change — new furniture, a refurbishment, a new terrace. Listings quietly age, and photographs that no longer match the house generate the most avoidable complaint there is.
Caption them
Most platforms allow a caption on each image and most owners leave them empty. Use them: name the room, note what is not obvious — that the second bedroom also has an en-suite, that the terrace is shaded until four, that the beach in the photograph is a six-minute walk. It answers the questions people would otherwise message you about, and it demonstrates the same candour that makes the rest of the listing credible.