The photos decide. Everything else confirms.

What the first photo has to do

One job: show the single thing that makes your place worth more than the identical condo two doors down. If that is the water, the water goes first — taken from where a guest would actually stand, not from the balcony rail at arm’s length. If it is a wood burner in a stone cottage, that. If it is that the pool is genuinely private, then the pool, framed so that the privacy is visible.

The mistake is opening with the exterior of the building. Nobody rents a building.

The shot list

Twenty to thirty images per property, in roughly this order:

1. The thing that sells it. View, pool, fireplace, the deck at golden hour.
2. The main living space, from the corner, with the lights on and the curtains open.
3. Each bedroom, bed made with the bedding you actually use, not a hotel-white styling set you own one of.
4. The kitchen, counters clear. One appliance on the counter, not five.
5. Each bathroom. Guests look. A missing bathroom photo reads as a bad bathroom.
6. The outside space, in use: table laid, chairs out, towel on a lounger.
7. The practical ones nobody takes: where you park, the walk to the beach or the lift, the front door, the stairs if there are stairs. These prevent the arrival message that starts “we can’t find”.
8. Two or three of the area, the ones you would send a friend.

Note the floor: at least eight images is what Google’s vacation rental structured data requires for rich results. That is a low bar and a useful one.

Doing it with a phone, properly

A modern phone is enough. What separates a decent phone photo set from a bad one is not the camera:

• Light. Shoot in the hour after sunrise or before sunset, with every lamp in the room switched on. Midday sun through a window blows out the view you are trying to sell.
• Height. Chest height, not eye height, and hold the phone straight. Tilted verticals are what makes a room look like a rental listing.
• Tidy harder than feels necessary. Remove the bin, the charger, the remote, the shampoo bottles, the fridge magnets. Ten minutes per room.
• No fisheye, no HDR halos. A wide lens that bends the walls makes the room look bigger and the listing look dishonest, and the guest who arrives to a smaller room writes about it in the review.

A professional costs somewhere around $250–500 for a property and is usually worth it on anything above a modest nightly rate — you are amortising it over years of bookings on every channel.

Do not just import the portal set

We can pull your photos from an existing listing, and for a demo that is exactly what we do — it is faster and it shows you the site with your own place in it. For the live site, get the originals off your phone or your photographer’s delivery. Portal images are recompressed for the portal’s layout, often cropped square, and sometimes carry a watermark you do not want on your own domain.

Alt text: two birds

Every image wants a sentence describing it. That sentence is what a guest using a screen reader hears, and it is also what tells a search engine what the picture shows. “Master bedroom with king bed and Gulf view from the window” does both jobs. “IMG_4021” does neither.